Three books I revisited this past week...

...powerful works that never fail to amaze – no matter the number of readings.




And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, by Olena Kalytiak Davis, winner of the Brittingham Prize (Wisconsin, 1997)


from “The Scaffolding Inside You”

Your thoughts have hung themselves from nails
like workshirts.

The sky has stopped
offering you reasons to live and your heart is the rock
you threw through each window
of what’s deserted you, so you turn
to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding
overhead, the fallen beams,
the unsound framework





Field Guide, by Robert Hass, selected by Stanley Kunitz, Yale Series of Younger Poets (Yale, 1973)



from “Letter to a Poet”

John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world

which makes us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us

power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.

What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind

we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us.






Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, by Anne Carson (Vintage, 1998)


a sampling of lines:

Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound
Of the horses like roses being burned alive

&

Hard morning winds were blowing life bolts against the sky each one blue enough
to begin a world of its own.
The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always
Had this trouble: a word like each,
When he stared at it, would disassemble itself into separate letters and go.

&

“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.

&

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.