12/14/2023 0 Comments Abandoned breaths by alpha pdf![]() " I am a collection of everything that has touched my skin. When it comes to love, we all speak the same language. I release the heartache, in hopes that by doing so, these words will find other hearts and bring them a measure of comfort. I feel them emerging, and for once I do not stop them. The ones we wanted to say, but never got the chance?Ĭlinging, building, breathing, and aching to be heard. It is ruthless in its inquisition and stores every one of them in your soul. When someone chooses to vacate your life, they seldom take everything with them when they leave. Yet, how can this strange, wondrous circularity be expressed on the page - where word must follow word - the project of the poem may be to arrange a paradox we live beside in such a way that we can enter it, inhabit it, view it intentionally, from the inside.What happens to the words that never escape the confines of heartbroken souls? There is a mathematics to the passage of time - a sense of odds - percentages - chances - intrinsic in time's forward motion. The elements of late winter - what we can perceive - do perceive - arrive, if closely observed, on a sparsely adorned cylinder. There are few elements on the face of the traditional watch - the action is circular and repetitive. To make this available in language requires a particular patience of attention. This limited vocabulary, the vocabulary of nearly identical instants, forms the center of time's concealed circularity. Seasons, shifting in microns, are the recurring vocabulary of time itself. A modeling of time, its observable passage through the observations of weather, interior and exterior. Limited components revolving, generating a shifting mosaic that replicates the passage of the winter days themselves. If history divides us, these poems of the past and present, as strong as boiling bush and as honest as jumbie truths, have the power to revive, and, perhaps, even, connect us." -Loretta Collins Klobah Searching wherever indelible traces of history may be found, in the undersea abyss of multiple shipwrecks, cholera coasts, accounts of disaster and cruel murder, hillside ruins, heaps of stones, and shifting sands, the poet brings us ancestral stories of the women of the slave ships, fishermen, migrant seasonal workers, cane cutters, cocolos, coal burners, domino players and family members who at great cost and risk have endured. "Singing 'light into bleakness,' in vivid poetic language that shakes us out of apathy, Georges' harsh and lyrical hymns portray the painful beauty of the Virgin Islands and Caribbean archipelago. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, 2017. To an Unknown Shore contains his final poems. ![]() The Maine landscape forms an integral part of his poetry, as does the isolation, both geographic and in terms of the distance from literary fashion and the academy that his life on the physical margin of the United States allowed. He said, "I like to be considered as a composer who happens to use words instead of notes." His first book, The Work Proposed, was published by Origin Press in 1958.Įnslin moved to Maine in 1960 and lived in Washington County until his death, working at odd jobs and making and selling handmade walking sticks. His teacher, Nadia Boulanger, was the first person to recognize his ability as a writer and encouraged him to pursue his interest in poetry. He studied musical composition at Cambridge, Mass. His father was a biblical scholar and his mother a Latin scholar. ![]() Theodore Enslin (1925–2011) is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. As its final gift this eloquent book treats us to a fractured narrative of the poet's education in the irony that is and has been an essential armament of survival for those in both his benighted lands." -Mark Weiss This is the stance of irony, which demands a double vision. But the very American wit and formal hijinks are Economou's own, as are the grace, for instance, of an epithalamion that Sappho might have sung-this isn't pastiche, but a bringing of past into present, as Cavafy did, and also of present into past. "Invaluable as they are, these retrieved Cavafy poems at moments seem a prologue to Economou's own, so deeply has he assimilated, in the course of decades of translation, both the older poet and the store of Greek classic poetry in which he also was invested. Partly an addendum to George Economou's versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, published by Shearsman in 2013, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself.
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