Showing posts with label Nightboat Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nightboat Books. Show all posts

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Cole Swensen's Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat Books, 2015)

Some favourite passages from Swensen's new book. I so look forward to her reading tonight at Burdall's Yard in Bath--it begins at 8 p.m.--join us!


Light. All accident. Across a rolling green, soft in animals.

*

Stream down sun in little coins.

*

A church too big for its hill. And cows easing down the slope. Slows its calm, and
More little sun goes on among selves.

*

                                                                                                                          A
Train across open land opens night. (A train lands all night across an open field.)

*

        Tree with light painted on. Then tree with points of dark which
Are birds or fruit that build slowly up into a night.

*

As the eye strikes a far thing, a
Small thing, a thing at this distance becomes distance alive all alone.

*

                                                                                                  Evening results
In a motion of sorts, a sort of splintering air.

*

                  Mistletoe crowding the emptiness of the empty branches
Of emptied trees.

*

              Making the water walk over the meadow like a line of bare
Poplars walks over a field.

*

The sun is a thrush, thrust up against, is falling in sheets, it falls in and sees....

*

You slide the screens to change the world.

*

                                                                         Season extant, season
Alarmed. The surface of water: a matter of light.

*

Birds toward the sea, a sea of them. 

*

The lights of a landing plane the streams of lights lining a road of a town the lights
Of a single light of a farm. Everything cannot be light, a light, we pass through
Miles of dark.

*

Down. To a sound, which has no shore.

*

Rain rains down upon rain.

*

                                                                                                                                Huge
Piles of leaves in the live sky burning the piles of flames into light dying in the sun.

*

                          The man across from me slightly shakes. He thinks
It's his hands. He shakes, and then he shakes them.

*

                                                                         Raw, strong roads that
Sweep the wind.



I found the easiest way to purchase Landscapes on a Train in the UK was to purchase it from Abe Books.




Saturday, 9 July 2011

Lytton Smith's The All-Purpose Magical Tent, second selection


The Tightrope Walker's Childhood


Fear of wheatfields. Fear of groundbeetles.
Fear of where the tree trunk disapppears

below ground. Fear of ground opening
to absence like the magician's trick cabinet.

She can sleep only on water and fitfully.
Footfall is an act of brevity then she is

soundlessly at your shoulder. From stilts,
rooftops, belltowers she studies faraway,

learns to think as a wing-walker, to harness
bird's-eye view: rivers are blue scarves,

an oxbow lake fits in the small of her back,
fields are a patchwork she can fold

about her at night. Here, afloat above
a sawdust ring, the audience's faces

safe as farms distance has made small, rope
is all the faith she needs. This is no feat

of balance. This is belief and aversion,
this is how earth becomes afterthought.


Lytton Smith
The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books, 2009)


You can buy The All-Purpose Magical Tent with free worldwide shipping from The Book Depository.

Friday, 24 June 2011

Lytton Smith's The All-Purpose Magical Tent, first selection



"Structural for the Tent"

Mainstay. Ringside. Acts. The audience is meant

To believe in the tent even when they pass on

And it’s dismantled—apparition. “The night sky

Was in there. The full moon. The clowns wore

The gravediggers’ smiles.” Circular and itself

In a field. The events transpiring within an illusion

The performers and watchers aspire to maintain.

“The lions I think Africa. The trapeze intercontinental.

We were magicked away.” But there’s nothing magical

About the magical. The audience invents a moment

The disappeared reappear. Any moment now. Now.

Now. I’ve watched the sleight-of-hand from the gods

And found it wanting—each act I can’t take back.


Lytton Smith


The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books, 2009) is available from The Book Depository with free shipping internationally. NB the double-spacing of the poem is accurate.




Monday, 26 April 2010

Boston Review's choice microreviews

Two poets I'm fond of are warmly reviewed in the current Boston Review, one of my favourite magazines: Lytton Smith, for his first collection, The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books), and Sophie Robinson, for her first collection, a (Les Figues), both published last year. Congratulations to both!