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Camille Norton is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Her previous awards include the Grolier Prize in Poetry, the Derek Bok Award for Teaching, and the Eberhardt Teacher-Scholar Award. She is coeditor of Resurgent: New Writing by Women; her recent work has appeared in Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The Colorado Review, Tiferet, Iris, Exphrasis, The White Pelican Review, The Gail Scott Reader, and How2, an online journal of women and experimental writing.

De la contraportada

A rich debut collection from a promising new poet -- selected by Campbell McGrath as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competition

For more than twenty-five years, the National Poetry Series has sought out and discovered new voices, helping to launch the careers of such luminaries as the former poet laureate Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

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Corruption

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

The Green Baize Table

I wanted the pear because it was green,
the same green as the baize of the banker's table
in a painting by Quintin Metsys,
The Banker and His Wife (1514)

and because it was the color of a young girl's bodice
in a portrait by Cranach,
the color of Renaissance materialism
purling over the surface of the visible.

In the painting by Metsys, the green baize table
is covered in florins, silver counterweights, and pearls
as if the table itself were the occasion for capital.

How green and planted with meaning
is the green baize table, how natural a green,
how like a pear or an apple,
a green as lush, as fertile as God's Providence
for the coming plantation of the New World.

The faces of the banker and his wife
are patient, smoothed by piety.

They are waiting for all we possess:
the traffic in things and in bodies,
the real, the virtual

He sits at the green baize table counting coins.
She sits beside him, turning the pages of her breviary.

But her eyes are all on him and the money

and in the Netherlandish light
one can see how much is changing,

how everything in this room is already a commodity:
the books, the pearls, the silver plate, the oval mirror
in which we can't stop looking at ourselves.

Excerpted from Corruptionby Camille Norton Copyright © 2006 by Camille Norton. Excerpted by permission.
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