By Hand

by John Reibetanz

Overview

Poems that examine the creative achievements of the human hand, from cave art to contemporary photography. John Reibetanz’s twelfth collection, By Hand, begins with an epigraph from Lewis Mumford: “Until modern times, apart from the esoteric knowledge of the priests, philosophers, and astronomers, the greater part of human thought and imagination flowed through the hands.” Reibetanz’s new poems investigate human creativity as a visceral interaction with the world: our imagining hands finding the music implicit in the stuff of earth, a “duet// of earthbound songsters,” of mind and material, each shaping the other. Centered on this duet, the book encompasses the wide-ranging aspects of our humanity—hands used for good and ill—portrayed in the examined paintings and sculptures, gardens, tapestries, photographs, and carvings. And they explore in particular the relationship in these artifacts between the “givens” of nature and the modifications and contributions of human culture. As Roo Borson says of the collection, “the poems are shot through with moments in which language’s particular dexterity comes into its own and real objects are remade, as when these lines from ‘The Installation’ celebrate the ‘commonality of clay’ in a relief by della Robbia:” the light-quickened humus of the eyes that, for hundreds of years, have read the notes inscribed on the banner an angel is unscrolling…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771315043
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Reibetanz is the author of eleven previous collections of poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry (Chicago), The Paris Review, The Walrus, and Canadian Literature. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards, the National Poetry Competition, and the ReLit Award, John has given readings in major cities all across Canada. He lives in Toronto and is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and a Fellow of Victoria College, where he received the first Victoria University Teaching Award. The Essential John Reibetanz, edited by Jeffery Donaldson, was published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2017.

Read an Excerpt

Grooving

This music goes a long way back before the needle
coasted in its groove on your grandfather's black vinyl
before the bow sang from valleys in the flexed sawblade

of his grandfather before ancient breath fluted from
the vent-holes ancient tools notched in the small vaulted roof
of a hollow bone back to where a flintstone burin

etched silent scales into softer stone or to the beach
where a pointed fragment of shell gave the hand's airy
motions a home in driftwood the way the waves in their

ins and outs hold the rhythm of the wind's breath this hand
makes music with the world around it but not without
an instrument chisel or gouge to transpose the mind's

notations to the range of pith and grain wood pushing
against the carver's flexed wrist retorting giving back
its own resonance to the tuning body duet

of earthbound songsters that becomes a trio when long
after the woodshed stills you run your finger over
the carving thrill to the flutings and you're in the groove

Table of Contents

I Instruments: "special anatomy"

The Lighter 3

Mantegna Perhaps 5

Innermost Hand 6

Grooving 7

Hands 8

II Visions: "magical, identification"

Found in Translation 13

The Roses, XVI 14

Flight Plans 15

The Barovier Wedding Cup, 1450 17

Tilman Riemenschneider's Hands 19

Decipherings 20

The Dresden Angel 22

Earthbound 23

Carving a New Creation 26

Lotte Reiniger's Magic Shadows 27

The Installation 28

III Fingerings: "a drawn bowstring"

Strung 31

Dickinson's Envelopes 32

Thoreau's Pencils 33

"Bird's Nest" Hunt 34

In Touch 35

Fingers and Thumbs 36

The Zeeland Tapestries 37

Confinements 39

Keys for the Homeless 42

Song 43

IV Earth Tones: "immersed"

Sonnets to Orpheus, 2:14 47

Beyond Grasp 48

Needlework from the English Civil War 49

Transparencies 51

Three by Grinling Gibbons 53

Woodborne 57

One Leaf 59

Leaf Morphs 60

La Mortella 62

Winter Flowers 63

Sonnets to Orpheus, 1:14 64

V Outreachings: "a creativity we cannot fathom"

Brushpower 67

Bridging 68

Liberation 71

A Handful of Loam 72

A Dance of Life 74

First-Hand 75

Ellwanger's Travels 77

Wolf Hat Traps the Moon 78

O 79

Hand-Me-Downs 80

Notes 83

Acknowledgements 87