Even the Dark: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Autor Leslie Williamsen Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 sep 2019
The speaker in this collection seeks an understanding of the darkness of suicide and mortal illness in the light of Christian faith. Poet Leslie Williams captures this light in tender and piercing poems that traverse a grieving world where healing is always possible but never assured: “my God can do this, but my God / might not.”
Through restless questioning, the speaker finds a balm for suffering in the divine beauty and mystery of the natural world. Seven prose poems woven into the collection deal with different aspects of a young girl’s life-threatening illness. Five additional poems wrestle with the grief of suicide and the emptiness afflicting those left behind. Other poems in the collection reflect on how to approach daily life while coping with heartbreak and express wonder about our responsibilities in a variety of roles: as parents, as neighbors, as an imagined anchoress, as children of God.
The language remains beautiful and precise throughout, whether the speaker lies “in a gully cracked / with stars” or tells herself, “It’s a handmade raft I live on.” The speaker entreats, as in Psalm 27, “teach me how to live.” Dwelling attentively in the abundance and mystery of creation, the book aims to offer a comfort and peace that might “even the dark.”
Through restless questioning, the speaker finds a balm for suffering in the divine beauty and mystery of the natural world. Seven prose poems woven into the collection deal with different aspects of a young girl’s life-threatening illness. Five additional poems wrestle with the grief of suicide and the emptiness afflicting those left behind. Other poems in the collection reflect on how to approach daily life while coping with heartbreak and express wonder about our responsibilities in a variety of roles: as parents, as neighbors, as an imagined anchoress, as children of God.
The language remains beautiful and precise throughout, whether the speaker lies “in a gully cracked / with stars” or tells herself, “It’s a handmade raft I live on.” The speaker entreats, as in Psalm 27, “teach me how to live.” Dwelling attentively in the abundance and mystery of creation, the book aims to offer a comfort and peace that might “even the dark.”
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809337491
ISBN-10: 0809337495
Pagini: 80
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
ISBN-10: 0809337495
Pagini: 80
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Notă biografică
Leslie Williams’s first book, Success of the Seed Plants, won the 2010 Bellday Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Image, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, and many other journals. She has received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Extras
ELM
At an outdoor concert once I lay in a gully cracked
with stars and felt intensely sorry I would not always
be around to take it in, to try out other lives, say
in a split-level under stardust, mother-in-law's tongue
growing dusty in the window, a visiting Buick
in the driveway, pillows and maps on the long
backseat. What gets me about fall is the chance
of going over a mountain-the snap that anything might
come to pass-and the violent absence of a friend,
who in days before had been knocking, whispery
at neighbors' doors until she and her son went savagely
missing from the earth, gone from every comfortable
routine, missing simply walking into grocery stores
among the beautiful hills of fruit. And today, a glorious
fall day, the kind to put your eyes out, radiant
solidity of brick-why could she not feel the dirt-floor
certainty that she would always want to wait and see,
hold out for one more violet, just-past-sunset
sky surrounding any ramifying tall tree, the dark
branches saying here I am and not a bit sorry.
LATTERLY
Lord, I do
expect you
in the coming-for-to-seek-me
in a humming afternoon
when home
in every corner will be
radical in comfort.
What's a life for? Mine's been
seeking safety mostly,
but there's that thirsting
for the well-to stride,
go forward, feast
on summer fineness,
country wine,
to trust the finest
summers still on vines-
possibly they are not
mine-
but are, for someone,
someone will.
Someone will adore the world,
its exquisite sloop.
THE GIRL IN US
From the deepest part of mind
a recurring doodle kept slouching out,
caught on paper as soon as she got home
from school, the gorgeous whole word California
filling up her pages with fat bubble script.
She'd been antic, pinpricked from looking
at maps. Her mother, and others, had stayed up
rocking her. She longed to rise from straitened
places, to rise-can you tell her that is wrong?
She's out on the front walk, night-cool cement,
moon in her notebook, drinking Shasta from a can.
She's in a hand-me-down nightgown
and stretching the sleeves.
CREATE ME IN A CLEAN HEART, O GOD
-Psalm 51:10
The thing I did for sorrow was silence.
The thing I did for sorrow,
the thing I did,
the silence.
I thought when replacing the pillow
under the sleeping girl's head
it's been a while
since kindness.
When my mother was sick
I didn't go
I rolled over in my own bed
I thought she wanted
to be alone,
alone how I like to be
to keep my misery.
There's not much overlap
in what we understand,
no guard against unloving
sticks piled up, the thatched
huts, my ingratitude.
FURLOUGH
On the nightstand the corpse of a pear,
a whole immobile March,
shuddered awake each four a.m. black
as a whistle-the cold-sweat instant
no hint of who she is-to go out
to the dovecote, throw birds to air, gone
with luff and lift. The blue ache
a sky all for itself, as joy is.
Feel how thin the lattice is
that holds us, fretwork of rotting calm.
At an outdoor concert once I lay in a gully cracked
with stars and felt intensely sorry I would not always
be around to take it in, to try out other lives, say
in a split-level under stardust, mother-in-law's tongue
growing dusty in the window, a visiting Buick
in the driveway, pillows and maps on the long
backseat. What gets me about fall is the chance
of going over a mountain-the snap that anything might
come to pass-and the violent absence of a friend,
who in days before had been knocking, whispery
at neighbors' doors until she and her son went savagely
missing from the earth, gone from every comfortable
routine, missing simply walking into grocery stores
among the beautiful hills of fruit. And today, a glorious
fall day, the kind to put your eyes out, radiant
solidity of brick-why could she not feel the dirt-floor
certainty that she would always want to wait and see,
hold out for one more violet, just-past-sunset
sky surrounding any ramifying tall tree, the dark
branches saying here I am and not a bit sorry.
LATTERLY
Lord, I do
expect you
in the coming-for-to-seek-me
in a humming afternoon
when home
in every corner will be
radical in comfort.
What's a life for? Mine's been
seeking safety mostly,
but there's that thirsting
for the well-to stride,
go forward, feast
on summer fineness,
country wine,
to trust the finest
summers still on vines-
possibly they are not
mine-
but are, for someone,
someone will.
Someone will adore the world,
its exquisite sloop.
THE GIRL IN US
From the deepest part of mind
a recurring doodle kept slouching out,
caught on paper as soon as she got home
from school, the gorgeous whole word California
filling up her pages with fat bubble script.
She'd been antic, pinpricked from looking
at maps. Her mother, and others, had stayed up
rocking her. She longed to rise from straitened
places, to rise-can you tell her that is wrong?
She's out on the front walk, night-cool cement,
moon in her notebook, drinking Shasta from a can.
She's in a hand-me-down nightgown
and stretching the sleeves.
CREATE ME IN A CLEAN HEART, O GOD
-Psalm 51:10
The thing I did for sorrow was silence.
The thing I did for sorrow,
the thing I did,
the silence.
I thought when replacing the pillow
under the sleeping girl's head
it's been a while
since kindness.
When my mother was sick
I didn't go
I rolled over in my own bed
I thought she wanted
to be alone,
alone how I like to be
to keep my misery.
There's not much overlap
in what we understand,
no guard against unloving
sticks piled up, the thatched
huts, my ingratitude.
FURLOUGH
On the nightstand the corpse of a pear,
a whole immobile March,
shuddered awake each four a.m. black
as a whistle-the cold-sweat instant
no hint of who she is-to go out
to the dovecote, throw birds to air, gone
with luff and lift. The blue ache
a sky all for itself, as joy is.
Feel how thin the lattice is
that holds us, fretwork of rotting calm.
Cuprins
CONTENTS
Crewelwork
/
Elm
The Great Mirror
Thinking of God's Goodness While the Ten-Year-Old Neighbor Is Suffering
The Youngest Ocean
When Walking by Lilacs, a Burning Smell
So Many Days Are Beauties
Trammeled Gaze across the Street
Fox in the Yard
Latterly
Safe in the Ground
Don't Worry
\
Come Make Your Coracle
The Girl in Us
In Which the Bread Crumbs Were Eaten by Birds
The Forest
Sprigged Muslin of the Heartbreak Voice
Exile from the Kingdom of Ordinary Sight
Bread of Heaven
She Visits Me
Present
Taking Orders
Forgetful Green
Come Here Weather of Love and Let Me Look at You
Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God
Bluebird of Happiness®
/
Land-and-Sea
Bird Pushed Out of Nest on Top of the Garage
I Have Let Things Slip
Cortège
Brought in Safety to This New Day
Last Night's Air Kisses
Apostasy, Failed
Magpies in Aspens
In the Second Half of Life
Even the Gladioli
Furlough
When I Was Alone
The One Trumpet Lily Speaks
Dog Days
Prayer That Starts in the Eye of a Bird
Self-Portrait with American Crows
Notes
Acknowledgments
Crewelwork
/
Elm
The Great Mirror
Thinking of God's Goodness While the Ten-Year-Old Neighbor Is Suffering
The Youngest Ocean
When Walking by Lilacs, a Burning Smell
So Many Days Are Beauties
Trammeled Gaze across the Street
Fox in the Yard
Latterly
Safe in the Ground
Don't Worry
\
Come Make Your Coracle
The Girl in Us
In Which the Bread Crumbs Were Eaten by Birds
The Forest
Sprigged Muslin of the Heartbreak Voice
Exile from the Kingdom of Ordinary Sight
Bread of Heaven
She Visits Me
Present
Taking Orders
Forgetful Green
Come Here Weather of Love and Let Me Look at You
Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God
Bluebird of Happiness®
/
Land-and-Sea
Bird Pushed Out of Nest on Top of the Garage
I Have Let Things Slip
Cortège
Brought in Safety to This New Day
Last Night's Air Kisses
Apostasy, Failed
Magpies in Aspens
In the Second Half of Life
Even the Gladioli
Furlough
When I Was Alone
The One Trumpet Lily Speaks
Dog Days
Prayer That Starts in the Eye of a Bird
Self-Portrait with American Crows
Notes
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
"This is a lovely book. Understated and beautiful poems with a lot of intelligence and stillness and honesty."—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Saudade
“Leslie Williams maps an uneasy distance to grace and the ‘mainsail beauty’ of life. ‘I love the purple inside oyster shells,’ one speaker admits, ‘but haven’t done a thing to help them.’ This collection offers us toothsome poems, witty and supple in their imagery, as we approach revelation inch by inch.”—Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves and I Was the Jukebox
“Leslie Williams’s Even the Dark is about finding the human person in a sometimes dark and unforgiving world. The speaker in these lovely and finely wrought poems finds her sometimes spiritual and sometimes physical voice in some familiar situations: dealing with children, neighbors, strangers on planes, writers’ suicides, children getting sick, going to the supermarket, arranging flowers. Through a range of interesting forms, and intricate syntaxes, the poems show Williams as a master of using the thinking mechanism of poetry as a possible way to peace.”—Sean Singer, author of Honey Smoke
“The finely worked and astonishingly beautiful poems in Even the Dark are prayers and meditations that ask the most difficult questions about suffering—our own, and others’—without losing sight of the infinite richness to be found in small, daily moments. Williams’s deep thinking about the lives of women—their tending of others, their demons and despairs, their need to remember and reclaim autonomous selves—allows her to render both individual and collective realities. Immense sadness is counterbalanced by intensity of insight; raw loss is transformed by the poet’s spiritually attuned wisdom, worthy of absolute trust.” —Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper
“Leslie Williams maps an uneasy distance to grace and the ‘mainsail beauty’ of life. ‘I love the purple inside oyster shells,’ one speaker admits, ‘but haven’t done a thing to help them.’ This collection offers us toothsome poems, witty and supple in their imagery, as we approach revelation inch by inch.”—Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves and I Was the Jukebox
“Leslie Williams’s Even the Dark is about finding the human person in a sometimes dark and unforgiving world. The speaker in these lovely and finely wrought poems finds her sometimes spiritual and sometimes physical voice in some familiar situations: dealing with children, neighbors, strangers on planes, writers’ suicides, children getting sick, going to the supermarket, arranging flowers. Through a range of interesting forms, and intricate syntaxes, the poems show Williams as a master of using the thinking mechanism of poetry as a possible way to peace.”—Sean Singer, author of Honey Smoke
“The finely worked and astonishingly beautiful poems in Even the Dark are prayers and meditations that ask the most difficult questions about suffering—our own, and others’—without losing sight of the infinite richness to be found in small, daily moments. Williams’s deep thinking about the lives of women—their tending of others, their demons and despairs, their need to remember and reclaim autonomous selves—allows her to render both individual and collective realities. Immense sadness is counterbalanced by intensity of insight; raw loss is transformed by the poet’s spiritually attuned wisdom, worthy of absolute trust.” —Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper
Descriere
The speaker in this collection seeks an understanding of the darkness of suicide and mortal illness in the light of Christian faith. Poet Leslie Williams captures this light in tender and piercing poems that traverse a grieving world where healing is always possible but never assured: “my God can do this, but my God / might not.”