translated by Jonathan Galassi Desire for your bright hands in the half-shadow of the flame: they smelled of oak and roses; and death. Ancient winter. The birds out foraging seed were suddenly snow; like our words. A little sun, an angel’s halo, then mist: and the trees, and us made of air in the morning.
The room was alive. I knew it better than my body. The whole house sighed and shuddered, breathing inaudibly through its doors and windows. In and out, in and out I went, and one existence melted like snow into another. The sun was fierce and crazy. I cooled in green pools or under the shade…
James Alan McPherson, A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, essays: With topics ranging from racism in the South to Disneyland, McPherson provocatively probes the geography of a morally bankrupt society, as he yearns for “spiritual civility.” Often magical and transcendent, all of these essays are heartfelt and resonant. (Simon & Schuster)
translated by Jonathan Galassi Ravager of lethargies and sorrows, night; safeguard against silences, the age of offhand sadnesses re-buds. And I see boys in me still slender-hipped, on the shells’ slope turn anxious at my changed voice.
Thief of the corn, patch of night against a perfect sky, I see you there watching me with your strange eyes. What message do you bring me? When the leaves fall you’ll be all we have left. Perched above the cemetery walk, you add your two cents’ worth when he reads the part…
Leonard Michaels, A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories: This collection of Michaels’s fiction from the early sixties to nineties glows with his inimitable style and trenchant perspectives on love and sex. (Mercury)
translated by Jonathan Galassi Choked with white and black roots, cut by the waters, the earth smells of ferment and worms. Sorrow of things I don’t know is born in me: one death is not enough if time and again now the sod weighs its grass on my heart.
To Spain, and not a single day of awe there. The Spanish swans lifting from the river: no ripples. To sit in a spring whose waters offer no prophecy. The not-expected. No one reading your mind. No stopping the light inside the beast from crumbling. Long ago, a fog came to settle on a low…
Robert Pinsky, Jersey Rain, poems: Marking a fresh, lyrical direction in Pinsky’s work, this volume is a luminous, fugue-like meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven. (FSG)
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