Hanne Bramness's No Film in the Camera (trans. Frances Presley, Shearsman, 2013)

Here are some favourite passages from this splendid book of prose poems:

Pools of dew swell with the coming of spring but it will soon freeze, because there is a sense of loss.

end of "1"

The floor is partially erased by the light, it is still possible to set out and get across. It is still possible to pull back, run home and put an end to this experiment.

end of "2"

Photographers do not spend their whole lives taking photos in order to recall surfaces, but what has happened just before or long before, and what will happen immediately afterwards.

end of "11"

The presence of the photographer is not really a threat, but a substitute for one.

from "15"

There are many who will not dissimulate, they sacrifice their smile.

end of "19"

She blushes and smiles with her whole body, as much as she possibly can. But trying so hard does not inspire confidence.

end of "20"

The photographer is hunting Europe's spring, along boulevard and pig sty, he wants to catch the light that deprives things of their value--meaning their place in a hierarchy.

end of "27"

If there is no sky in this picture it is still an image of the heavens.

end of "33"

There's no doubt, she is who she pretends to be. 

end of "67"

Some time during the night it happens, she takes a picture of the dream tree just as the clouds are ripped away from the moon.

end of "81"

A fruit tree with buds, stopped before they could unfold, not shrivelled, not dead, but transformed into an image of longing.

end of "77"

Like the ice, the photo keeps everything in place for a while. And the picture exposes the silence, but if you listen long enough it will break into a roar.

end of "82"

You can buy this illuminating book of prose poems directly from the publisher here. 

from The Modie Box, i.m. Bernadine Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

from The Modie Box

I do not understand how I can be alive while you are dead. The field white with snow and the absence of crops. Closer, the creamy brown clumps of stalks, the world after harvest.

*

They offered you to us as a possible vegetable. A butternut squash, perhaps, its pale warmth.

*

I took a box file and put everything I had of us into it—letters I wrote you, cards you sent me, photos and postcards. I stuck on a label. Its presence on the shelf reassures me.

*

Burnt toffee peanuts, salt water taffy, lightly sweet white wine, Constant Comment tea, raisin bread toast, orange roughy, salmon, Polish sausage, black olive pizza.

*

Death, resurrection, death. What could be more violent?

*

The line crackled, but I could still hear pain in your voice, if not each precise word. I fought myself not to call back, to find a clear channel, to extend or intensify your difficulty. If I’d known it’d be the last, I would have succumbed to my selfishness. Without such knowledge, I nearly had, anyway. I tried to allay my guilt for not calling back but wanting to by going online for flowers at once.

*

This hunger unappeasable.

*

There is no redemption here. Sometimes I pick up the box and shake it, and that absence, its dry sound, drags me to weeping.

*

Hazel eyes: sunlit wheat

*

The florist could say when the flowers had been left at the hospital, but not if—

*

I begin to suppose I will never stop writing this poem so I, agnostic, dubious of heaven, may keep talking to you.

*

Your body soft with loose flesh, your embrace a leaning into ease.

*

I wrote my first poem outside of class at age 11. We were camping in Indiana, and I’d gone to the lake with my journal while you and Dad set up the Steury. As soon as I finished the first draft, I dashed back to the site to show it to you.

*

When you laughed hard or long, you wiped the corners of your eyes.

*

A lock of hair from youth: black-brown. A lock of hair from age: hazel, glimmering honey brown, dye from a box.

*

Marigolds and mums, the only flowers she dared plant, they needed so little care. 

---

This piece originally appeared in Shearsman. 

 

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), third and final selection

My thanks go to Tony Frazer, editor at Shearsman Books, and Peter Riley, for allowing me to post so many quotations. Here's a final round of favourite passages from Riley's new collection:


...they asked us what songs we'd brought with us.

*

We'll evict ourselves when we need to.

*

from "VII. Lateral Spread and Forward March. Erwartung. Préludes."

Apocalypse too is lullaby.  

from IX

That name I was, blown away in cloud as this life must flit

with the winged seed driven under the stone, calling in vain for respite. 

*

Break the lifeline down to the pain and

desire that everyone knows. There is nowhere else. There is nowhere else

to be or speak. The earth enters you back into its folds unsatisfied, there

is no other song; there is only September, when the falling year offers us

everything there is, and teaches us to measure the distance. 

*

A network of bright lines falls over experience, like a field system, breaking

the grip of totality as the wave breaks on the shore or the air on the

mountain side. In and across these polygons we attach principles and

mitigate conflict. It is painful walking downhill on stones with exhausted

calves but script will bear us to the end.

*

Language failed him.

As it fails us all, and we tighten the cord on the tent flap asking sleep

come shine along. 

from "XI. The Ascent of Kinder Scout"

Who comes in the form of a black dove

and flies into the future?

*

How am I to resolve the contradictions? Parts of the brain

close down and the music touches the heart. But to rescue us

We need the mind entire. The mind the place the night the river

the stars the black bird and the wine. We cannot afford wine

Or toffee, or mother's milk. All flesh is as grass but

we can't afford grass. Yours faithfully.

from "XII. Angel Meadow"

Buy this book directly from the publisher here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), second selection

Some favourite passages:


                                       Our old romances return

freshly laundered on the backs of migrant workers

from former colonies and recent war zones.

*

Take me into a war

where the compass point searches for the heart

and a continent gathers around a companionship of respite.

*

There is too much poetry, it infiltrates alien discourses.

The financial news is given out in metaphors and stage accents,

and only the initiated know what's happening

*

                                      ...when I consider

the termination of my life the owls call, meaning no harm,

and the northern windows rattle the windows.

A shrinking recess in the dark surface of place

holds such authenticity as is left. This stinking Eden (clarts etc.).

from "IV: Strangers Arriving. Soldiers Returning"

Like leaving school, a sudden cold field,

Yes/no questions: what are you going to be? (c1956)

*

Indeed we know we are nothing, our language is lies

       my sighs, my broken words, the sink of my passion

into inarticulacy, the everyday which is where we live

in which we are trapped

       Gentle shepherd, rain on the window

                 It is an honour.

*

Gentle fold in the hillside where we sit and sing

of the world's lapses....

*

                                                 We are not mad. Reality

is not hidden. We prove it, with our hands, at work, perfectly clean.

A bitter wind in the night, cold and damp infiltrates

the house through the walls

        hope through dreams of fear.

*

...the casual and cynical madness of the press.

*

...on railway bridges in Heaton Norris in wild

                     costumes of the soul with small notebooks....

*

                               We were told

          we were alone and refused to believe it....

*

I like this town                                    "I want to be remembered

I like its nervousness

I like being excluded                          as a blue cloud

I want to be forgotten

and melt back into company              in a white sky"

*

To reach the shining port of our melancholy

                  that levers us into a new world

                            through a darkness with an arch over the entrance

                                         reading "Work Makes You Tired".

from "V: Locospotters"

In sleep "we" is restored to the choral "I"

And the singing can start

the great chant of humanity suddenly unafraid

under contract, rights to offset duties

*

All' mein Wirkin, all' mein Leben

All my working, all my life

All my doing, all my finishing

                 devolves on you

attentive ear, shielded breast.

*

                    Events, lives, spinning into light or dark through dream

The grammar of our quest a squaring

of this spin, lakeside cabin in snow

from "III: Water Songs. Schubert/Goethe.

Mayakovsky the Russian Scarecrow"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman books here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), first selection

Some favourite passages:



                    ...raising the head, learning wisdom

in a form of desire, a distance to be gained, learning to wait,

           absence of question-marks, Orphic stasis.

*

                       ...wood smoke drifting across the fields

         dividing thought                between love and duty

*

Tell me-- how from the vast emptiness of the million words

the short phrase strikes the bone between the eyes,

tell me how the world is altered, so little

tell me as little as possible, tell me falsetto

        tell me all night--


*

Then sustain it, tell me

        what you have, lost or left

        in a language beautifully linked

that you could tell the links one by one

like the links in a silver chain, a silver

        tested and coined, fixed in the moon's side,

                   over the end of the world

and we'll get there, reach

         the flowered arbor, the chambered tomb

                             crawl into it and read the stone

with difficulty (about honour).       Then answer


Where are you from?

*

Tenant farmers above Halifax,

world of clarts and slopstone

and the rain singing in the yard.

from "I: Housman's Question"

And another child is born,
somnolent in white lace
and always welcome (what 
is a sky without a star in it?) 1830s urban
infant mortality rate 50% (what is a sky
without a soul in it?) soul tugging at
soul under a black sky.

*

stations built of overlapping chords, where we

laid our heads on the hard wooden benches and

dreamed our own cathedrals, man woman and child.

from "II: A Lost Patrimony"

...as the year points to the stars chattering

in the morning sky with a lark's clarity, the stars fading away.

*

As I came into this world far from

any centre, pratensis "of the fields" so I

moved out, seeking a hand in darkness as 

a child against the wandering fires in the night fields

learning to breathe in the world's fullness

a single truth, that held a dying hand, far from any centre.

*

...consolation for a life of dread

as death is warmed to.

*

                                                          ...under the kestrel's path we moved

out and back, seasonally or daily,

                                                           going to Marks & Spencer's for a shirt

well beyond the northern limits of the nightingale.

*

...and wafts us out of our indulgences

to the waking place, the narrow cot, the birthing light

                          not far from the duties. Or Elektra's

                          sentence.

from "III: The Generations. The Dispersals. Funeral Duties"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman Books here.

Maureen Thorson's My Resignation (Shearsman, 2014)

On Wednesday I heard Maureen Thorson read at an off-site AWP event, Saturday I bought her book at the Small Press Distribution booth at the book fair, and I've read it over the last two days. Here are some favourite passages:


O questor at the doorstep of high summer,
the weathers of a heartbreak
left me red-eyed, wary,
              transparent to the winds,

tawdry terrors
underlying my tenderness.

from "A Man for All Seasons"

You've come down where your heart lies, 

from the great cold enclosure, 

a southerly course.

             At the head of no army,

             with one smile

             and two hands to make your case.

             Past several rivers,

             bright medals of your intention.

from "Follow the Leader"

Alphabetizing ourselves while azaleas go gaga.

Hot pink shockwaves drowning out the yard.

from "There Will Come the Great Reshelving"

The idea(l) of the unconditional

             leaves me waiting at the window

             to glimpse that singularity--

a flash in the middle distance

             where 

             the watcher and the watched one

might converge.

end of "Meet Me at the Vanishing Point"

Curious to thrive.

last line of "The Sun Sets Every Day"

Thinking of collision. Hands arranging my hair

             as red branches frame the window.

Teeth white as flashbulbs. Limbs clash,

             entangle.

             Petals no one tells apart.

end of "Closer Than They Appear"

Not to be alone--

             a shivery, upwelling pleasure.

end of "'Applause for This Shared Vigilance'"

Every emotion carries the seed

             of its loss, excruciating bloom.

from "Self-Portrait as Tragedienne"

              In it to win

the beautiful wreck.

end of "Jackpot"

(All along the fenceline, I uproot

              encroaching morning glories.

              I throw 

their twining corpses over my shoulder.) 

from "On Marriage"

The weather report calls for continued transcendence:

Lengthening evenings, gilding the telephone wires

as they dip over the yards, rattling slightly

with the feral hum of air conditioners.

from "Trophy Life"

When I kiss you, the night kisses back,

                           velvety, intolerable,

                           a greedy creature

lurching comically on rubbery wings.

from "Through the Looking Glass"

Whiling the green evening away in a restaurant

             located adjacent to the possible.

from "Smorgasbord"

Purchasing details for My Resignation are available at the publisher's page here. 

Claire Crowther's On Narrowness (Shearsman, 2015)

Some favourite passages:


Mosquitoes charged me with their sour sugar
outside the vinegar house. Six years, ten years,
sixty, it ferments from oak to juniper
to chestnut to cherry and back to oak wood barrels,
balsamic vinegar separating itself
from a hundred year old mother sediment.

opening stanza of "The Apology"

...till we both are

woken by pain with its orange beak.

end of "Separation"

I cling to you tighter 

than a striped shell

on a fennel stalk.

last stanza of "Snail"

A translator can add only humility

to the original.

from "TB Hospital, 1944"

         She watched a ship

slip into pearl while sunset

picked up importance.

from "Alcyone"

His rage fermented into speechlessness.

 from "The Night of Misrule"

What do you make of this dangerous space,

the gutter? Children commandeer it and conjure

what they can from such silken dust as is

human and poor.

opening stanza of "Graffitista"

...a goddess bereft of

her creation, summoning

my existence to her high sound.

*

...my whole 

halo of seeds.

from "A Dormative for Strings"

Not a wolf. Surely there is not

a wolf. Some other. I must be guarded.

end of "Opponent"

...if I get lost in End Erring,

find me. I'll be ankling over

stones. At least my backpack,

external organ full of function,

and my marks on snowy bark,

finally at ease with repetition, 

find them, find them.

end of "A Wanderer in End Erring Wood"

Our friends are scrambling towards the top stone stretched

like wall. I hope they sit on it and wave.

The wind has mounted those yew trees.

They're not upright nor our friends.

opening stanza of "Rockborne"

On Narrowness can be ordered from The Book Depository with free shipping here.

Helena Eriksson's Strata (Shearsman, 2014)

My student, the poet Wendy Klein loaned me this book; she and Jan Teeland translated it from Swedish, and it came out earlier this year from Shearsman Books. Here are some favourite passages from this book-length poem:


the riverbed, the flat stones comprise the place
for the final scene


                               Fiction is the junction

*

               This is no real city. They're just acting. It
is real in my memory

*

                             the way of working stays within the frames
                             the way of working defines the frames

*

meanings stitched into the embroideries. Out there on the fortress
What was expected of her

*

Cover the body

               "fluttering golden veil"


        touches every part of the body that isn't listening

*

They pass in the forest of figures, discover places once again, now without intensity. The sharpness or salinity of these discoveries, and even the radiance itself, has diminished. Nevertheless they send thin rays out over their hands. My body has begun to emit darkness.

*

after the winter illiteracy

*

I think of him where he stands with his
grammar    the whole night haunted by
suffixes

*

There was frost still lying over the ground, not even the dogs
were out     still longing for you when I
went     the membrane over everything or
the very sheen of the membrane

*

nothing that is left and nothing that
lies behind     only cupped hands and pairs of eyes

*

the darkening     remains
stinging silence no: speech
rises     remains

*

(the only relief is her gown
in her gown his and hollowed out)



You can purchase Strata directly from Shearsman's website here.

Peter Riley's Greek Passages (2009)

In the quotations that follow, the slashes are not line breaks, but punctuation the author's inserted in prose poems, because that's how Peter Riley rolls in Greek Passages (Shearsman Books, 2009). As all the poems are untitled, know that each new passage comes from a separate poem.

Small chirruping cries, echoed along the coastal cliffs.

*

Our sustenance dragged across our fear....

*

The light of our souls downcast / onto the stones of the shore / Money, what have you done?

*

Wake into fallen dark / the labyrinth cut into the open

*

...when I / catch that music, / tuned to the distant hurt, the small voice.

*

I don't make a narrative, I / await an arrival, a song.

*

Coachloads arrive wanting to buy something / something redemptive, though it might not last. / / Up in the windy hills the rain / marginalises us, serving / every cell of the landscape.

*

Justice that survives in the tales while the actuality lies ten feet down a shaft grave. There was no justice.

*

The mind is a cold and lonely place, its doors locked. Outside in the moving air is where things happen.... / / The orange butterflies speckled black or brown, that vanished with the first rain.

*

But there is an immediacy, a smoking chimney, somebody looks up from the news. The singing is unstoppable. A gecko runs across the wall-o.

*

We are reduced to a single moment, a shout of denial, a syllable in the night. Then we are finished.

*

The clear picture, the better articulation, the linear spread. Lord it is lonesome among poor remnants of success, struggling to recognise the world.

*

The answering, the brightened heart, a refuge because a resource, and a resilience, a burgeoning, a dazzling sanity.

*

...look / at it there, the plurality shining in the night / seeking questions for its answers. 

*

...the secular complexity devolving on hope / the lyric of everyday....

*

Arriving at dawn in the foothills of Taigétos / the dark shapes becoming known, sense / unfolding from the eastward slopes, a little misty, beginning to breathe /

*

Whitethroated sea / discursive light / pale red wine holding / a gleam in the glass / Dionysiac calm

*

Conversing with the dead at another entrance to Hades, continuous with the sky.

*

And lyric redeems narrative, and hand in hand on the edge of the sand . . . / The small boat entering the harbour, turning the engine off, drifting to the quayside, carrying home, by the light of the moon.

Purchase Peter Riley's Greek Passages directly from the publisher, Shearsman Books, here.

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.