Forrest Gander's Torn Awake (New Directions, 2001)

In preparation for Forrest Gander's reading at Burdall's Yard on 26 November (you can book tickets here), I've been catching up with his work. Here are some favourite passages from this collection:


Look how your relation to truth creates a tension
you have slackened with compromise.

*

...measuring out an exile between self and self.

*

There is something more 
                                          than rhythms of distance and presence....

*

But who is it that is speaking
in the glorious, unstrung light?

from "The Hugeness of That Which Is Missing"

While the stars flare and the waitress crumbs

the tablecloth, are you just opening again

to the lust to be filled with something? What is it?

from "To the Reader"

...and the canyon opening

out in front of them its magisterial consequence....

from "Line of Descent"

Pain as utterance

withheld.

from "Carried Across"

Love solves nothing, though it has made me appear.

 from "To the Invisible World"

It seems the best way to obtain Torn Awake in the UK is from Abe Books here.

 

Forrest Gander's Eye Against Eye (New Directions, 2005)

Here are some of my favourite passages from this collection by Forrest Gander. I've been catching up with his work in preparation for his reading at Burdall's Yard in Bath on Thursday, 26 November, about which there are more details here.




At sunset the surface of the wall gleams gold gleaming

and seems from even a short distance a smooth

impenetrable force swelling forward to meet the light

*

                 The fragility of presence. A bird

perched at the tip of a branch. Singing, we say.

from "Burning Towers, Standing Wall"

Half-lidded days of early winter.

*

He sees the woman's face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared.

*

As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience pendant, unnameable.

from "Ligature"

a sobering enthusiasm for the unmoored

*

you dance with your hips and feet while I'm all torso

there's a cure for that

*

veracity confronts us

ravens warning awe awe

*

should you crack and spill the yolk of yourself

you will find in me a stay

from "Present Tense"

In the riffle of leafy detail, we sense the respiration of the forest.

from "River and Trees"

Meanwhile, saturated by the density

of light, the tower and trees blend

into a compassion

                               where all the sight lines meet.  

end of "The Broken Tower"

and do we invent this privacy

the privilege to brim with each other

*

divorcing you from me

from the rhythm of our tangency

our breaking into my and my

*

from an infinite distance

I recall you

your presence

blows in, a red petal....

*

you can't tell

what is happening

until it moves on and is gone

as someone and someone's grief

careen around a corner

from "Mission Thief"

(my favourite poem in the collection, highly rcommended)

His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.

end of "Ligature 4"

You can best find and purchase Eye Against Eye in the UK from Abe Books.

Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011), second selection

More favourite passages:


To be defiled is to be recognizable to yourself, she thought.

last line of "Evaporation 3"

Where do you think you come by your pattern?

from "Moving Around for the Light, a Madrigal"

Smoking is the Bosnian national sport. Everywhere the poets meet to read or discuss poetics, we look across the room at each other through soiled gauze.

from "Bosnia-Herzegovina: Life Is Waiting"

Hospitality's other face, hostility

And then stepped back, measuring him for a haymaker.

*

Each a stranger to the other's strangeness

And she strokes her horned toad in the direction of its spines.

from "Evaporation 4"

...a meadow softly-furred

as a bumble-bee....

*

        A song sparrow stops

                                                 anting its wing to fulfill

what silence wants, and look: the child's face,

                                                                her wet lips, her even teeth--

 from "Lovegreen"

...a languorous sine curve of a journey that ends with the brake-smoking descent into an abyss where the beleaguered town of Andacollo has been flung.

*

He started to imagine fighting sadistic force with poems as insubstantial as contrails over a city.

from "Chile: Pigs of Gold"

In the UK, you can purchase Core Samples from the World from The Book Depository with free delivery.

Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011), first selection

Some favourite passages:


From the seat behind her, the boy pokes his sister's head with a plastic fork
And getting no response, tests it on his own head.

*

It sounded like the chimmuck of a rock dropped into a stream
And the piston-driven breathing of sex.

from "Evaporation 1"

What does it mean, a cauterized topography?

*

The sense of epoch loosened, unstrung.

Each one thinking it is the other who recedes like a horizon. 

*

In the open pit at noon, men waning in brightness.

*

The air burnished, almost mineral, like a thin peel of mica.

*

The distance flat as horsehair plaster, all depth sponged away.

from "A Clearing"

What is taken as evident wafts away.

*

(Here, as everywhere, male bonding is acted out as a kind of coalitionary self-destruction.)

*

The riders have not given up, but the storm is barreling theatrically toward them, their clothes snapping in wind like a fire.

from "Xinjiang: The Pamirs Poetry Journey"

And who was it the surgeons narcotized

before excising a chunk of muscle and cancerous

flesh over my shoulder

blade and grafting the hollow

with a sheet of my own skin the breadth

of a paperback, assuring me later

the wound will fill in with blood and

flux so now,

twenty years later, this salsa de chile de arbol

makes my scar throb?

*

To welcome the

strangeness of

strangers

not versions

simply of

my own

thought.

*

Synthesized with a common

helplessness. Fined-down

by the exorbitant demand of work,

surrounded, inundated with chatter

as the zócalo is

when grackles descend en masse

whirring, wheedling, scrawking.

*

The world shifts

on a hairline crack. All last summer

you and I met for lunch in a clearing

we didn't know the locals call

The Girl's Grave.

*

Returning again

to the ever-iterated assertion

of myself.

*

                        Marriage

is only what continues

to be entered into. 

from "The Tinajera Notebook"

The band is striking up another standard nightclub number and a fifteen-man choral group in tuxedos tries once again to croon and gesticulate their way into the audience's tequila-tinged susceptibility to schmaltz.

*

Just once a year it blooms. In a few hours, at dawn, the flower will be wilted on that tendril like a tossed pair of panties.

*

And Mexican time seems to have a different rhythm, flexibility, and capaciousness that time in the United States. Here, we continually feel time slipping away, we throw ourselves into work to get something done before time passes, the hours evaporate, we don't know where the day has gone. But in Mexico, some quality derived from the realities of Mexican life provides for an intuition of temporal layers, of one thing touching on another, of reflections and shifts in perspective, the interplay of presence and possibility, a dimension both quotidian and hallowed, the anguine twining of the visible and the invisible.

*

But in Mexico, what is erotic is the transition, the ongoing slide form one strand of presence to another, approach and access, never the arrival. Mexican time is another form of curiosity--   

In the UK, you can purchase Core Samples from the World is available from Book Depository for £11.99 at the time of this post.  

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952 (New Directions, 1971), third and final selection

Today's the day I depart for the Dylan Thomas Centre to give a workshop using Thomas's notebooks and a reading. I finished rereading the Collected Poems just in time--though I think I may have drawn the reading out for the sake of making it last. Here's the last round of splendid passages.


My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.

*

Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
Quiet as a bone.

from "Once Below a Time"

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,

I drew the white sheet over the islands

And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

last lines of "When I Woke"

O keep his bones away from that common cart,

The morning is flying on the wings of his age

And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

last lines of "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid

Was a Man Aged a Hundred"

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening

To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound

And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing

The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

from "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed"

...the wall thin as a wren's bone

*

...the splashed mothering maiden

Who bore him with a bonfire in

His mouth and rocked him like a storm....

*

For I was lost who have come

To dumbfounding haven

And the finding one

And the high noon

Of his wound

Blinds my

Cry.

*

The world winding home!

And the whole pain

Flows open

And I

Die.

from "Vision and Prayer"

And he who taught their lips to sing

Weeps like the risen sun among

The liquid choirs of his tribes.

from "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait"

        Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means

*

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs,

           Before the children green and golden,

                       Follow him out of grace, 

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand....

*

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

                       Time held me green and dying

            Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

from "Fern Hill"

(which I would have liked to copy entire)

Sanctum santorum the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling.

*

                                              All tell, this night, of him
Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

from "In Country Sleep"

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave....

*

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

from "Lament"

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

last line of "In the White Giant's Thigh"

You can buy Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems from Foyle's Books for a mere £7.49 here.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), second selection

More splendid passages from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems:


Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

*

I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town,
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown....

*

Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.

from "I Make This in a Warring Absence"

If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house. 

from "'If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot'"

...the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

*

After the first death, there is no other.

from "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, 

by Fire, of a Child in London"

I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

*

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

from "Poem in October"

Unluckily for a death 

Waiting with the phoenix under

The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days....

opening lines of "Unluckily for a Death"

The colossal intimacies of silent

           Once seen strangers or shades on a stair

from "Into Her Lying Down Head"

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

from "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

*

                                     ...the long gone glistening

Parish of snow.

*

In that far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

                        And the bird descended.

from "A Winter's Tale"

Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

*

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

from "There Was a Saviour"

(Imagine all of "In My Craft or Sullen Art" here. I want to memorize it.)

Begin

With singing

Sing

Darkness kindled back into beginning

When the caught tongue nodded blind,

A star was broken

Into the centuries of the child

Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

*

And the dust shall sing like a bird

As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

*

Love is the last light spoken.

from "Ceremony after a Fire Raid"

A copy of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), first selection

Some favourite passages as I reread the Collected Poems in preparation for my workshop and reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre in late June....
 

At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,

*

O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,

*

(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)

from "Author's Prologue"

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

*

Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.

from "I See the Boys of Summer"

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb.

*

...and the womb

Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye

Is half its light; the fathomed sea

Breaks on unangled land. 

from "A Process in the Weather of the Heart"

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

*

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind 

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

opening and closing lines of "The Force That Through 

the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

from "If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love"

By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

last line of "Especially When the October Wind"

Joy is the knock of dust....

from "When, Like a Running Grave"

I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,

In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,

Hearing the weather fall.

*

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

*

I, in a wind on fire,....

from "I, in My Intricate Image"

...dusk is crowded with the children's ghosts....

from "Why East Wind Chills"

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

last stanza of "Should Lanterns Shine"

Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

last line of "Because the Pleasure-Bird Whistles"

At the time of posting, Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is available for a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books--just click this link.

Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995)

...Sokrates
opens his--

eyes stacked with the motions of roses in that other dawn
and a torn coolness--

reluctantly.


*

Pale dawn was filling up the lap of the room.

from "TV Men: Sokrates"

You dove once

into your privatest presentiment

and stayed, face down in your black overcoat.
To my wonder.
Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
To live here one must forget much.

the end of "TV Men: The Sleeper"

XXIV.

A stranger is poor, voracious and turbulent.

He comes

from nowhere in particular

and pushes prices up.

His method of knowing

is to eat it. 

*

XXX.

A stranger is master of nothing.

Who in a nightmare

can help himself?

*

XXXIII.

Rome collapsed when Alaric ran out the dawn side. 

from "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide"

Lapping at Isaiah's ears black birdsong no it was anger.

*

The nation stirred in its husk and slept again. 

*

It was a cold winter evening, the cold bit like a wire. 

*

He slept, the asters in the garden unloaded their red thunder into the dark.

from "The Book of Isaiah"

Anne Carson's 'The Glass Essay' (1995)

Some favourite passages from Anne Carson's long poem, 'The Glass Essay,' from Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995):


Spring opens like a blade there. 

*

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

*

Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.

*

                               By now I was so cold
it felt like burning.

*

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light
is filling the moor with gold milk.
I have reached the middle

where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water.
It is frozen.
A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.

*

It is a two-way traffic,

the language of the unsaid.

*

The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object
existing in space on its own shadow.
I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.

*

His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air.

*

Sunlight flocks through the room.

*

He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house--
except the hands. The hands keep growing.

*

I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say.
Her answer would clear this up.

But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.

*

Those nights lying alone
are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn.
This is who I am.

Peter Cole's Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions, 2008)

I stumbled onto a stack of new copies of this book at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford last week and was surprised at the counter to be charged £4. 'How'd I get so lucky?' I asked. 'Look at all that stock,' was the response. So if you enjoy the passages below and would like to get your own, I recommend visiting or phoning the Albion Beatnik. I must say, though, I prefer Cole's earlier volume, What Is Doubled, which is less sententious and heavy on end rhyme than Things on Which I've Stumbled. 

Here are some of my favourite passages from this volume:


Not just the past ascending into
   the present of a given seeing,
but that present itself collapsing
   into the voices speaking to it--

so that the current, mixing, becomes
   duration which one, mostly, lives:

*

Cut off by worms and time--
as we will be,
                        and are

*

Thus the poet responds
                   to cruelty
song the product of exigency

*

. . . friendship souring inside aloneness . . . . 

*

how language's lightning in the sentence is won . . . 

from 'Things on Which I've Stumbled'

. . . my own slug-like conscience,

moving along by, it seems, contracting

against itself. The slime and motion inching me

toward the sublime, through confusion, like wheat.

*

                             Bad translation

is like drawing a bucket from a moonlit

well--and losing the silvery shine on the surface.

*

                               There is a power

rinsing spirit with detritus, like a tide.

*

In an extension of the mind, nearing its

limits--deltas of twisting branches forking

finely toward a pewter sky, shifting as

roots of those trees descend through silt, to sewage

and clay. There, Solomon said, are spirits.

*

The dervishes turn on axes as old

as earth's, but pointing toward their own tombstones.

Within their shroud-like cloaks and skirts they spin.

I'd gone thinking I'd see a hackneyed thing,

then watched my heart's arms like their dance unfold.

from 'Notes on Bewilderment'

. . . nothing without the mind's holding it there in the day's crucible reckoning . . . . 

from 'The Ghazal of What He Sees'

The army has nearly written a poem:

You'll now need a permit just to stay home.

from 'Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem'

. . . when things were good,

it seemed there was more

air within than without.

from 'Proverbial Drawing'