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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780618822126
Ornate elements from European art and bruised blue-collar
lives from middle America (Toledo, New Mexico, Trenton, and
elsewhere) form the poles around which Donovan’s lyrical debut
revolves. “There’s something to be said for the pattern ruin
makes,” he explains, and his own patterns combine ruin and splendor
in the manner of great mosaics, with dozens of noun phrases, lists,
memorable names of things, adjacent and conjoined in his long
unrhymed lines. “A Blues About Wanting in the End” finds, in a tree
destroyed by beetles, all manner of elegy and suffering: “the wood
honeycombed, scar-sprawled & furrowed;/ the tangle of channels
where the larvae have hatched.” “An East Toledo Map of Ash”
includes “pastel plastic hangers,// cans, a punctured hose, a
framed sketch of orchids streaming from black grass,// black bags
cinched with twine.” Another poem begins with an epigraph from a
medieval historian, and ends in northern New Mexico, where the poet
lives now, and where he finds sources of “joy: knitted V-neck
cardigans; coyote fence posts// looped with wire; a pair of work
boots snared in the telephone lines.” Chosen for publication by
Mark Doty (who contributes a foreword), Donovan’s detail-packed,
even bejeweled poems resemble, in spots, those of Amy Clampitt and
Albert Goldbarth. Though Donovan’s odes may not find the formal
complexities of the former, nor the comic variety of the latter,
the sheer vigor of his noticings could make him a poet to watch.
–(Publishers Weekly )
Vellum, the exquisite debut collection from Matt Donovan,
meditates on beauty, art, and the violence that is sometimes
inherent in both. Here, he juxtaposes religious iconography with
stories from history, biography, and personal narrative. In the
poignant Saint Catherine in an O, a knife bears unlikely dualityan
object stirring with danger and grace. A man plays slide guitar /
with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs/ one
about light, the Lord moving on water . . . / how blood, he knows,
will make him whole. In other poems, he reflects upon master
artists, who captured similar themes in their art though in
different mediums. Brimming with poems that are quietly powerful,
Vellum marks the arrival of a commanding new voice.
Foreword ix
Part I Pulling Down the Sky
Saint Catherine in an O: A Song About Knives
Montezumas Painters
Small Blessing for a Child
Fumbling with a Field Guide on the Back Arroyo Trail
Charlie Chaplin Dug Up Ransomed: A Prayer
Second Pilgrimage, Rodeo Nites
Line
Those Two Sketches by Severn in Italy
Part II A Partial Invocation of Our Days
Night Train: A Listeners Guide
The Keeper of Hands
Portrait of the Whirlwind in Job as a Passenger Pigeon Flock
The Scabbard of Limbs Means Flesh
An East Toledo Map of Ash
Thumb Trick
Licking the El Greco
A Blues About Wanting in the End
What I Mean When I Say Blossom
Part III Shapes of Stone Prayer
Trenton, a Solmization, Two Rivers, a Few Tells
Patio Lull with House Guest View
Swallowed Things
To a Student Who Refuses to Read More of The Inferno After
Learning None of It Is True
A Damaged Fresco of The Massacre of the Innocents
Audubon Diptych
Towards the Sound of a Heron Stepping on Ice
Notes
Acknowledgments
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