Jaime Robles' Hoard (Shearsman, 2013)

Some favourite passages:


...words zigzag into words

and gather into cloth.

*

Like Persephone I have left my mother behind.
You, with your precision, would claim that she has left me,

but her death was neither her choice nor mine.

*

I enter the silence around me: its space grown large and doorless,
denser than fur
or feathers thick at the breast--
paths lead elsewhere.

Not all silence is retraction,
its intentionality allied with small cruelties.

*

And the planet veers through space, resembles an afternoon in Los Angeles

*

...baffled until combed into pattern.

from 'White Swan'

...words retract into her mind, repeating,

hang back

struggle to renew

become abruptly vatic

from '(lash of the tongue)'

--impulsed out, slipping forward: fox paw on ice--

from 'These Spare Objects'

time lies flattened,

stretched into a hoop:

pricked 

into lapsed

panoramas--chinks 

among cracks--crevices

opening so that

the fifth section of 'Diátrita (opus interassile)'

The soft shush of breath and heart's

outward flight quelled, fallen earthward turning--

*

The past's

forward flight looking back, always, turning often and again--reluctantly,

folded, replaced, altered.

from 'Four Matching Gold Bangles'

Though beauty unconsidered

seems like light or distance

in relief: a flight

from 'Utere felix, domina Juliane'

And because there are two of you,

time shutters open, just as now removes itself to then,

shedding on its way details--

patterns of light, and story-telling, absurd and restless.

from 'Sieve'

like love, a construct conjured from the body's

hungers, or spun off

from the wholeness of the planet,

the mammal's jigsaw

fitness.

the third section of 'The Hunt'

The silence between syllables hangs like a question mark

and, so, touch between us melts into a brief deferral of motion.

from 'Red Boat'

Further information about Hoard, and numerous links to purchasing it online, are available here on the Shearsman Books website.