The Intimacy of Spoons

Jim Minick

Description

The Intimacy of Spoons explores the many metaphors of the spoon: from love and marriage to the spoon of a grave that holds our bodies; from the darkness of loss and night, where “the Big Dipper is nothing but / the oldest spoon pointing us home”; to the darkness of lungs transformed into art. The poems cover a wide variety of topics—cultural, political, familial, and natural—and always, underlying these poems is the song of birds—with broken wings or clear voices, avian muses filling our forests now or long gone. There are nods to Basho and Thoreau, to Eliot and Frost, Dickinson and Milton, this last, a long poem that retells the story of Adam and Eve from the point of view of Mal, the apple. Likewise, The Intimacy of Spoons shares a variety of forms, from sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to syllabics, lyrics, and a ballad. At the center of the book is the long poem, “Elegy for My Body,” which uses wordplay and contrasting voices to explore mortality, because “You can’t really do time; / it simply does us, / or undoes us, / us beings in the time being being beings / on Times Squared / waiting for the big ball to fall.” The poems of The Intimacy of Spoons return us to everyday stories and objects, common yet profound.

Contents

*

1 To Spoon

3 Coyote Grace

4 James and Jim Ponder Enough  

6 First Hard Frost

7 Sighs

8 Lasts

10 What If We Learn at Last, but the Land Stops Forgiving?  

12 One Apple Blossom

13 Vessel

14 Every Person Deserves a Statue and Every Statue Deserves a Sledgehammer

16 Good Dirt

17 Stress Test

21 Spoon Riddle

22 Because in the Village of Where

23 Diminished

24 Whale Light

26 Still Dark

27 Trenched

28 Mort for Short

29 Wrestling the Dead

31 Exercise

33 Ode to a Basket 

34 Know the Trees, One by One

**

37 Elegy for My Body 

***

51 Another Truth

52 To Spoon the Dark

53 Why Birds?

55 Spangled 

56 The Collar 

57 Tim Slack, the Fix-It Man

58 A Boat Called Kinfolks

59 Gas

62 Spoonbill

63 A Spoon Against Forgetting 

64 To Thumbnail Evolving

65 What Happens to Bulldozers in Heaven

66 Earth Diving

67 Mal and Slick's Ballad

70 Hawk Says Finally

71 When You Realize the Future 

72 Lincoln's Ax

74 The Oldest Spoon

75 Broken Wing

77 Cup of Sun

78 Gluteal Fold

79 Blink

81 The Intimacy of Spoons

 

82 Acknowledgments

85 About the Author

Sujets

• Themes
• Subjects
• birds
• Poetry
• Family

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2024
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440768
• Langue: English

Extrait