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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781942683803 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BOA Editions, Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2019 |
| Series: | American Poets Continuum , #173 |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Write About This
About somebody else’s past life, about Theseus’ dark twists and turns so like your own. About someone missing in the ruthless country, the hundreds of delicate spirals on the surface of Mars, the barn that droops lower each year, or about how it feels to be stranded halfway between here and there. Or write about the unhappiness in the dream of a funeral or how animals make faces that look like people. Or when the burn pile is stacked like a street of offices and the leaves shine golden as coins on hillsides, or when the wind hints about the day that basks in its own juices. Or write about being worried by all the beauty, about missing it. About when we can’t miss anything anymore. How will that work? Or write about an evening full of squirrels flying between us, telling us. These are recipes for what I am seeking, or what I have seen in a portrait here and there and in a story about where the nightingale has gone.
The Human Half
Wind whistles in from the shed and past us. I see traces of wildness in every house and, in the eye of a friend, the raw gleam of a machete. One hand in the oven, the other out the kitchen door into the storm. Raw house, always half-built. Raw human, still harebrained, the part that loves and the part that does not. It begins with the sperm’s wild dash to the egg. There’s a tribe that “opens” a person by making him laugh or by splitting his skull. Among the Bororo, to cook is to hear and answer the call of rotten wood. I’m consumed by who is cooked and who is not. Half-baked, my father used to say, meaning I was half in a state of nature, the yeast still rising.
To Birdsong and the Owlfly
No cloud sees a route through the sky. No bird—not hermit thrush or house wren— hears the song he sings or his own rasp, chirp or chuffle the way I do. Winter birdsong is like the spiraling trail an owlfly leaves for anyone to follow, like the pitfall trap made to catch an ant. The song catches me. Notice how the owlfly’s name is half bird, half insect. I wonder if it hunts with sealed lips the way I am hunting, mute as a hummingbird, for some way to speak.
What I Know about the Night Sky
The new moon is never visible on the night of the New Moon, though when the sky is darkest you sometimes see fireballs flash, and through the night, newly-bare branches reach towards the sky while my brother has electric shock therapy, convulsions he won’t remember. They cut some connections in the brain, the ones that fine-tune grief. While I pace, I look for Andromeda, so many light years away that the rays I see tonight were emitted when wooly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers roamed here. The next day my brother reaches out to me from the darkness he’s wrapped in. He tests the light.
A New Geography
On the days she walks beside me, I remember Eratosthenes, how he used shadows to calculate the earth’s circumference, coined the word for where objects are. Though we don’t know how they lived, we can locate lost peoples— the Maya, the Angkor, the people of Easter Island— an atlas of nations, names for lost, floating bodies of land— an invisible reality hidden near us, living with us the way her shadow curves along beside me.
Table of Contents
I
Voices 13
Write About This 14
The Human Half 15
Landscapes 16
Matisse's Vase Says 17
Memory Box 18
Switching Hands 19
Passion Flower 20
Not at Rest 21
In Black and White and Red 24
A Woman Holds a Balance in Jan Vermeer's Painting 25
Ocular 26
Midden 27
To Birdsong and the Owlfly 28
II
The Unpainted House 31
What I Know About the Night Sky 33
Ghost Prattle 34
The Red Suit 35
A Piece of the Moon 36
A New Geography 37
Here's Looking 38
Next to the Railroad Tracks 39
I'm Done 40
On the Day You Come Back 41
Fingerprints 42
Navigation 43
The Nightmare 44
I Am So Dark 45
Despair 46
What to Call a Chicken 47
III
After the Beginning, Before the End 51
At the Tree Line 52
Tidal 53
Various Rains 54
Oyster River Seafood Market 55
Collage: Whispers, News 56
The White Spruce 58
The Understory 59
From a Garden in Corniglia 60
Star/Garden 61
Just to Be Clear 62
The Green Scent of Snow 63
Tomaz Salamun Meets Metka Krašovec 64
Dear Metka Krašovec 65
Wrong Turn in a Snowstorm 66
In the Cambrian 67
Lilac Manual 68
Winter White 69
In the Snowfield 70
Acknowledgments 73
About the Author 74
Colophon 80
What People are Saying About This
“Deborah Brown brings to her poems an attentiveness so fine, and so intense, that it concentrates into passion. With her probing curiosity, her seemingly galactic range of tone and subject, and her masterful ear, this poet asks the most fundamental questions: 'How to do celestial navigation for myself,/for whoever is left?' Deborah Brown’s The Human Half makes an original and profound contribution to contemporary poetry.” —Peter Campion
“Everywhere between the Cambrian and earthly world to the stars and our lost moon, Deborah Brown sees a world as various and rich as her language, and in many ways because of it. Fernando Pessoa wrote that words ‘are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities,’ which is to say they lead us, as Deborah’s superb book does, into worlds beyond them. It is sight that guides her, as observation, dream or memory, through a startling style that ranges from a kind of realistic surrealism to realism. It is perhaps the dramatic tension involved in trying to see so much that lends her its power: as she writes in one poem: ‘At twilight, even birds lose part of their vision.’ No matter. Here is a world of objects as you have never seen them before, and the way she sees them reveals a way of living in the world that can only enrich our lives. More than a book, this is a world you need to enter.” —Richard Jackson
“There is a kind of scientific curiosity in these poems, a keenness of intellect and passion for knowing, but through feeling rather than reason (‘With fingers warm and thirsty, I steal: / a pomegranate, a silverfish and once, / strawberries in a thatched box.’) Accomplished and thrilling, engaged and engaging, these poems sway toward and away from ‘the human half’ in fascinating and surprising ways—the other half being the world and its astonishments.” —Joan Houlihan