Immediate Song: Poems - Tapa blanda

Bogen, Don

 
9781571314819: Immediate Song: Poems
Tapa blanda
ISBN 10: 1571314814 ISBN 13: 9781571314819
Editorial: Milkweed Editions, 2019

Sinopsis

From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time―about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects―rendered in cinematic detail―fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago. Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

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Acerca del autor

Don Bogen is the author of five books of poems, including Luster and An Algebra, along with a critical book on Theodore Roethke and a translation of selected poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza. He has collaborated with composers from the United States and abroad. Prizes for his work include a Discovery Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation. He has held Fulbright positions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast and at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo in Spain. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large of the Cincinnati Review and divides his time between Cincinnati and Martinez, California.

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On Hospitals

i. GroundsThe old ones held a varnished elegance
like mansions, cruise ships, or resort hotels—
quiet places, formal, set apart.

You dressed up when you visited. The ease
of a leisured past gleamed in their rooms:
the vaulted lobby with mahogany desk,

mail slots, and leather chairs where I waited
with my father for my sisters to be born;
the long, open TB porch in the Hartz;

or the solarium at Cowell where my wife
had mono as a student. Each morning
she’d wake to cortisone and fresh orange juice,

a view of campus in the lifting haze:
damp redwoods, eucalyptus, and the steam
of coffee rising from a china cup.

*

ii. A Run

Taxpayer opulence, generous care—
a quaint nostalgia, I know, no room for it
now everything is sleeked-down, corporate,

high-tech: medical centers with landscaping,
tasteful signage listing doctors as groups
and associates, intricate as law firms.

The buildings themselves have shrunk, reproduced,
and spread out into complexes, like the one
I run through sometimes: a hospital village

suffused on Sunday mornings with village quiet.
I pass the closed clinics and re-hab centers,
construction sites abandoned for the day,

garages almost empty, night nurses
slumping at the bus shelter in scrubs
like washed-out pajamas. Few visitors

at this hour—but once I saw a boy
walking behind his mother, in new shoes,
bow tie, and stiff blue suit, carrying a rose.

It snags the heart, that helpless love of the child
who fears the parent may leave too soon, helpless
parent afraid to leave the child too soon

(it is always too soon). The hospital
holds these feelings like a theater,
an album flush with memories, a brain.

*

iii. Rooms

There are rooms for arrival—the green-tiled vault
where our daughter met the world, the lustrous hall
buzzing with student doctors for our son—

and rooms for departure, with their tanks and screens,
tangled nests of tubes, and endless humming
as if you were inside a clock. When age

thumps on your heart, thickens your blood, they need
for you to drink this grayish milkshake now.
Here is a cap for your newly bald head,

a gown that ties in the back where you can’t reach.
Your IV stand, a frail hat rack on wheels,
will accompany you—slowly, slowly—

to the awkward bathroom. Everyone here
is nice but distant, everyone in these rooms
is tired but cannot sleep. Because you’re old

you are a child again, like everyone here,
taking your medicine from a little cup,
trying hard to figure out how to please.

***

Promise Song

When the taps ran blood
she set her books on fire—
then she was in a white place
where everyone lied.
Words, words, words:
smoke puffed out from mouths,
stick figures of her name
in riot on the forms.

The fat door hides the rules
under its mattress pad.
A conference room is calm.
If you promise, they said,

and told me in the silence
after they put her back,
Don’t listen—everything
she tells you is a lie.

***

Elegies

What comes more easily now
than writing to the dead?

To look back at the body
and tell what it would know

(if it were still someone
who could know) consoles,

the slowly gathered pain
harmonious as snow.

You did, You were float down
and melt on the closed lids.

You would—subjunctive, pure—
drifts upward in cold fog.

The list keeps lengthening.
Name after name, each gets

a little heap of songs:
white prayers, white offerings,

a shabby vanity
the dark will wash away.

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Editorial
Milkweed Editions
Año de publicación
2019
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
1571314814
ISBN 13 
9781571314819
Encuadernación
Tapa blanda
Número de páginas
96
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
no disponible