In this Book
- Requiem for the Orchard
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: The University of Akron Press
- Series: Akron Series in Poetry
summary
These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place "where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley," where a boy would learn "to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel." Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and "the filthy dollars we'd wad into our pockets," or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties-or because of them-there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway "like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower." In line after line, poem after poem, there is an immersion in the realm of the senses. The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images: a ten-gallon hat on his head in the second grade is "an upside down chandelier;" carnival workers "snarl into the darkness on their borrowed Harleys." In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it. -Martín Espada
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- In Defense of Small Towns
- pp. 1-2
- Part I
- Sticks and Stones
- pp. 11-12
- The Poet at Ten
- p. 14
- Self-Portrait with Taxidermy
- pp. 16-18
- How I Learned Quiet
- p. 19
- Self-Portrait in My Mother’s Shoes
- pp. 22-23
- By Addition
- p. 32
- Highway Towns
- p. 33
- Self-Portrait with a Car Crash
- pp. 37-38
- No One Sleeps through the Night
- pp. 40-41
- Part II
- How I Learned Bliss
- p. 46
- Once, Love, I Broke a Window
- pp. 49-50
- Meditation with Smoke and Flowers
- pp. 51-52
- Self-Portrait as a Small Town
- pp. 63-64
- Autumn Songs in Four Variations
- pp. 65-68
- Ghost Hunting as Physiography
- pp. 69-70
- Eschatology in Five Acres
- pp. 72-73
- Prayer for What Won’t Happen
- pp. 79-80
- By Subtraction
- p. 83
- Self-Portrait with What Remains
- pp. 85-86
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 87-88
- Akron Series in Poetry
- pp. 89-90
Additional Information
ISBN
9781935603986
Related ISBN(s)
9781931968744
MARC Record
OCLC
746598387
Pages
88
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-11
Language
English
Open Access
No