Pelican Tracks

by Elton Glaser

Overview

Pelican Tracks is a book of poems with a homing instinct. Elton Glaser travels a restless circuit between his native Louisiana and his adopted home of Ohio, from the “spice and license of the lowlands” to the “streets of Akron cobbled in ice.” These reflections, leavened with a fierce wit and moving bravura of language, are extracted from the origins and ends of the poet’s life—his birth in the final spasms of the second World War, the fears and excitements of youth, the death of parents, and the unexpected losses of adulthood. Marking his tracks between the Pelican State and the Buckeye State, Glaser records the damaged beauty of “everything sinking, everything rising again in the mind.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809325160
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/12/2003
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron and editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. He has published four full-length collections of poems: Relics, Tropical Depressions, Color Photographs of the Ruins, and Winter Amnesties. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry and Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. He coedited, with William Greenway, I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	ix
1
	And Redeye Gravy with Everything	3
	Solstice in Capricorn	4
	Ohio Haiku	5
	Immaterial Witness	7
	Akron after a Spring Rain	9
	Plus Shipping and Handling	10
	Dead Reckoning	12
	The Youngstown Breakfast Show	13
	Alligator Pears	16
	O Holy Night	17
	Swampscape with Oil Platform	18
	Living in OH	20
	Metairie Cemetery	22
	Drowning in Ohio	23
	Incompatibles in the Wild Light	24
2
	1945	29
	Mardi Gras Indians	30
	Grand Isle	31
	Bedtime Legends near Esplanade	33
	Hurricane Lamp	35
	Trailers	36
	The Worst High School Marching Band in the South	38
	Benjamin in the Salvage Yard	41
	Problem Child	43
	Late Fifties on Front Street	45
	2 Drink Minimum	46
	Evening Services on North Rampart Street	48
	To John, in Alaska	50
3
	Storyville	55
4
	Time Zones	65
	Shucking	66
	Family Possessions	68
	Pilgrimage	71
	Louisiana Elegies	74
	Listening to My Mother Breathe	76
	Oscillating Fan	78
	Elegy for Clifton Chenier	81
	On My Mother's Death	83
	Pelican Tracks in the Rain Dreaming	84
	Black Baptist Funeral	85
	Endsheet	88
	Notes	91

Editorial Reviews

“Elton Glaser’s Pelican Tracks offers us an intimate and intricate portrait of gritty down-home life in Louisiana. The characters and places that populate this book reveal lives thoroughly lived and remind us that whoever and whatever surrounds us quietly invades us—in the best and perhaps worst sense of the word—and, finally, becomes us. Glaser observes ravenously and lovingly; these poems are beautifully detailed. In fact, reading these poems is not like reading really, more like watching and listening—the way we might engage a good film. There is no frivolous decoration here, no breading, just meat—no foam, just beer: dark and rich with a sharp bite after every swig. This is a singing that is both playfully and painfully desperate—like good blues, an embodied music that knows how to move gracefully between hard times and fat times.”—Tim Seibles, author of Hammerlock and Hurdy-Gurdy



“These beautifully made poems—rich as redeye gravy, crystalline as Ohio ice—will delight anyone seeking a fresh understanding of the American soul. Elton Glaser is a stellar lyric poet, a true witness to the immanence that is everywhere. He’s also a folklorist, weaving vivid stories of his native New Orleans: the music of the ‘Only Female Cornetist in the Tenderloin’ and the ‘Worst High School Marching Band in the South.’ The pine straw and fire ants, dirty rice and champagne are here, as are ‘Mister Jelly Lord, the creole snoot’ and “Miss Moment . . . hamhock of a woman.’ Glaser is a national treasure. His poems are at once gritty and reverent, profound and comic. If you worry for the fate of literature, read this book and take heart.”—Alice Fulton, author of Felt and Sensual Math

From the Publisher