From the Book of Giants
From the Book of Giants
Song
for Thom Gunn
There is no east or west
in the wood you fear and seek,
stumbling past a gate of moss
and what you would not take.
And what you thought you had
(the Here that is no rest)
you make from it an aid
to form no east, no west.
No east. No west. No need
for given map or bell,
vehicle, screen, or speed.
Forget the house, forget the hill.
Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I
Bocca della Verità
Dante: To Guido Cavalcanti
Twister
Elegy: Reading Dugan in Rome
Hanging Mobile
National Pastime
2004
Postcard to Thom
Found Letter
Tempo
Trampoline
Cloak
II
Vita Nuova
III
Weegee: Coney Island Beach after Midnight
In the Country
Games for Someone
The Bed
Quilt
Song for Staying
Out of Range
Cricket
Mosaic
Departure
Net
Song
Searchlight
Lament from the Book of Giants
Notes
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