Cloud of Ink

Publication Year: 2011

On the surface, L. S. Klatt’s poems are airy and humorous—with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub—but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.

Under the heat of inquiry, under the pressure of metaphor, the poems in Cloud of Ink liquefy, bend, and serpentine as they seek sometimes a new and sometimes an ancient destination. They present the reader with existential questions as they side-wind into the barbaric; the pear is figured as a “wild boar” and the octopus is “gutted,” yet primal energies cut a pathway to the mystical and the transcendent. The poetic cosmos Klatt creates is loquacious and beautiful, strange and affirmative, but never transparent. Amid “a maelstrom of inklings,” the writer—and the audience—must puzzle out the meaning of the syllabary.

Published by: University of Iowa Press

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Book Details

E-ISBN-13: 9781587299728
E-ISBN-10: 1587299720
Print-ISBN-13: 9781587299711
Print-ISBN-10: 1587299712

Page Count: 84
Publication Year: 2011

Edition: first
Series Title: Iowa Poetry Prize

Cloud of Ink

Cover

Front Matter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Aeronautics

More Splendid

Liquefaction

Transit of the Beautiful

Insult Is Necessary for the Perfection of Beauty

Momentum

Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91

The Pear as a Wild Boar

Husbandry

Ohio

Berryman in Cincinnati

Darwin’s Mouth

The Zoo of Reason

Ovation

Shakedown in the Sugar Shine

Recreation

Whippoorwill

The Calm of a Thoughtful Sentence

The Good Fight

Affliction

February

A Vague Field for Priestcraft

Mercy Planet

Cortona

Body Part in a Tuscan Garden

Canticle : Calculus

Antediluvian

Acqua Alta

Burano

Reading

Where My Sunflower Wishes to Go

Old World Birds

White Elephant

Arrow

Semiconductors in the Breadbasket

A Sudden Unspeakable Indignation

The Americans

Pioneer

Broadcaster

The Fluid Rider

The Firmament

King Salmon

The States of the Great Lakes

J. D. Salinger, Recluse, Dies at 91

Figment in Pink & Transcendental

May Day

Nocturnal Movements of the Porcupine

Fish & Wildlife

She Makes Me Lie Down

The Good Guide, ca. 1310

George Keats

The Lily Always Hangs Its Head

Liquidambar

Crete

Lines of Motion

Chiaroscuro

Audubon

Heaven

Frontiersman

The Repository of Sacred Music

A Better Mousetrap

The Author

For Lack of a Better Word

Notes

Research Areas

Recommend

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