Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire (Shearsman, 2011), second selection

I've finally finished reading Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire and can't recommend it enough--it's excellent, and its array of forms, mostly invented, is magisterial. Note that in the selections below, the spacing on the page is generally not the spacing in the original--I've had so much trouble trying to figure out how to do intricate spacing in Blogger.

I would have been your most

Precise friend, if not your enchantment, the winding of

Your air.

from "Ending with a Spell Incised on a Rib of Scrimshaw"

But certainly angels

feel solitude through and through

As perfectionism heading directly for rage.

*

In times of

human war,

You'll hear angels railing at statues of saints, screaming, "Do something!

Do something!"

*

Later, soon, once Hunger and

the other

Angels in attendance this summer, along with all their swan cousins,

lie down to sleep, distributed there

On the water's bank, then Tearbringer, and all the other resident saints, come

and steal in among them,

To lie down too, interspersing, so that through

the night, their somber

robes and the glossy white wings

Make a chessboard, of gray and gray, camouflage,

to tax the eye, to baffle

the hand, of God

from "On Boston Common"

That is how ignorant I am, thinking those folk are somehow avatars of pertinence, whereas she knows, it is not from the hall that the fetch will come but from that corner

*

And of self-forgiveness, that part of the Janus figure stays inchoate

from "Folio"

(key-

Board slippage left of f, or keyboard slippage

Right--wind, or wing--"father" coming out "gather")

from "Patronymic"

Not one of us had but heard

the wind at night,

The perception for I am alive inside

the countable lives.

*

We'd heard the wounded birds

coming down from the sun;

We'd heard the psalms

centrifuging into eternity;

*

The most outspoken among us

now says only

that the most outspoken

among us then

was heard to say:

"It is begun."

from "Pentecost"

You can learn more about the book and find links for purchasing here on Shearsman's website.