Cairn

Peggy Shumaker

Description

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Sujets

• Women Authors
• Poetry
• Alaska

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781597096935
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

CAIRN
BOOKS BY PEGGY SHUMAKER
P OETRY
Toucan Nest
Gnawed Bones
Greatest Hits (chapbook)
Blaze (a collaboration with painter Kesler Woodward)
Underground Rivers
Wings Moist from the Other World
Braided River (letterpress chapbook)
The Circle of Totems
Esperanza s Hair
L YRICAL M EMOIR
Just Breathe Normally
CAIRN

new and selected poems and prose by
P EGGY S HUMAKER
with an introduduction by
K EVIN C LARK
Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA
Cairn: New and Selected Poems and Prose Copyright 2018 by Peggy Shumaker Introduction 2018 by Kevin Clark All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Selena Trager
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shumaker, Peggy, 1952-author. Title: Cairn: new and selected poems and prose / Peggy Shumaker. Other titles: Poems. Selections Description: Pasadena, California: Red Hen Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017034739 | ISBN 9781597096119| eISBN 9781597096935 Classification: LCC PS3569.H778 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.54-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034739
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
for my family by blood and by choice
for my students, who continue to teach me

for my beloved Joe
CONTENTS
Introduction, by Kevin Clark
N EW P OEMS
Parenthood, Unplanned
Stepped Ice, photograph by Barry McWayne
Stop Bath
P LACING O UR F EET WITH C ARE ON T HIS E ARTH
Shape-shifters
The One Waiting
The Poems You Cannot Write Right Now
River Ice
Baby Steps
Fragile
Special Effects
They Had Mornings in Those Days
Placing Our Feet with Care on This Earth
How to Live
The Basics
Other Days
A Meditation
Healing
Anyone Who Comes Here Must Be Transformed
Commonplace Miracles
Yes, Before
Rope Neck Thing
S PARKS
a conversation in poems and paintings
The Conversation
Three Blues
Geology of Wonder
Sun at the Horizon
Green Up
Listening among Birches
Letter to One Who s Gone Before
Succession
Sideways Walking
Kiss
Lilt, Patter, Bound
I MPOSSIBLE G RACE
Touching What s Wild
Reading Out Loud the Whole Book
Lists
Holy, the Soup
No Recipe
January
One Week After
Choices
Valentine for Eva
Eva s Cairn
The Holiness of the Ground
The Pie Dance
Strong Enough
Lives of Shadows, Lingering Scent
Becoming Earth
from E SPERANZA S H AIR
Esperanza s Hair
A Crack in the Balanced Ship
Landlady
Pancho Villa Meets El Mudo, the Deaf Shopkeeper
Praying for Scars
Welldigger
Jigsaw Puzzles
A Divorced Mother with Children
The Apple
The Lever between Her Breasts
Calvinism
from T HE C IRCLE OF T OTEMS
Glass Rattlesnakes and the Three Incomparable Daughters of Marisol
The Garden of Earthly Delights: Detail, Tucson
The Waitress s Kid
First Thing in the Morning, clairs, Lightning
Sugarbird, Hiding
Owl/Beating
Cinco de Mayo
Blue Apples
October, Snow
The Circle of Totems
from W INGS M OIST FROM THE O THER W ORLD
Once You Name It
Gravity
Decisive Victory
White Figurehead at Isla Negra
Young Boy Dancing at Playa los Muertos
The Provider
Hanna Zoe
Hunting Scorpions
Dust Devil
Graveyard Shift 22 nd Tucson Boulevard
Why Ira Pratt Cocked His Head Like That
Ira Pratt s Charts of the Stars
Three Notes from a Wooden Flute
Creamer s Field
Glacier, Calving
Exit Glacier
Melt
Strong Stars
The Run of Silvers
Rapt
Clitoris
Short History of One Hour s Desire
from U NDERGROUND R IVERS
Too Soon after Rain
Pantano Wash
Saddled
Churning
Milk
Easter, Grave Tending
Hillclimb
Owls Cough Balls
Ajo Lily
Night-Blooming Jasmine
What to Count On
Rime
The Story of Light
Bear Plan, Brooks Range
Aubade: Morning Aurora
Camouflage
Dive
Each Rise, Each Hollow
What Will Remain
from B LAZE
The Trees Won t Notice
An Intimacy
Matisse s Antoinette
Elegy for Getz
Walker Lake
Just This Once
The Told Secret
Anniversary
God Gestures
Swans, Where We Don t Expect Them
Wide Icy River
The Longest Night of the Year
from G NAWED B ONES
Gnawed Bones
Nests, an Elegy
As War Goes On
Desert Odyssey
Touch and Go
You re Here
Swallows
Ha Ha Ha
No Sign
Beyond Words, This Language
Alb ndigas
When Ground Cannot Take in More Rain
Land Fraud Nosebleed
Go to the Broom Closet and Pick Out a Stick
Asthma
Sky of Souls
Mother Tongue
Deliverance
In Praise, Ephemera
Oatmeal
Kus-sun-ar
Spleen
Naming What We Hold in Our Hands
Chatanika
Long Before We Got Here, Long After We re Gone
from T OUCAN N EST
Genesis, Quetzal
Blue-Gray Tanager, Here, Gone
Keeping Loud Ones Quiet
Sloth
Toucan Nest
How the Motmot Got That Tail
Venom
Basilisk Lizard
Getting Away
Painted Cart with No Oxen
Tent Revival
Burnt Fields
Strangler Fig
Ancestor
Blue Morpho
Spirit of the Bat
Passion Flower
from J UST B REATHE N ORMALLY
Moving Water, Tucson
Mother s First Words after the Birth
The Apple
Good Times
My Father s Wives #1
Neighborhood Kids, Tucson
Iron Filings
Sand Rubies
Shelter
Rolling River
Rights, Pictures
Homecoming
Rollaway Geometry
Lips, Tucson, 1969xs
My Father s Wives #2
Locket
Holy Man, 1992
Turquoise Dress
What Comes Next
Before the Tube
Just Breathe Normally
Wilderness
Shower
Dr. Martino
Altars
D a de los Muertos, Whidbey Island

Notes
Acknowledgments
Gratitude
INTRODUCTION
Peggy Shumaker is a discreet radical. Her poems are paradoxically marked by sonic restraint, thus augmenting her radically expansive belief in emotional freedom. She exhibits a resolve to push against long-held, surely patriarchal ideas about the boundaries of sentiment. Holding to a notion of reality not unlike Federico Garcia Lorca s duende, she realizes that perception is a constantly reforming, even dreamlike, journey. She s not limited by compulsory notions of reserved expression that have marked so much English language poetry, especially since T. S. Eliot s doctrine of impersonality (1919) came to mean that emotion was not to be trusted. Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, and perhaps a few of the Beats may have briefly broken from traditional tonal constraint, but over the last century most poets have felt safe within a threnodic voice that resists poles of joy and grief and love.
Shumaker s breakthrough poetry doesn t reject threnody, that dreamlike tone of lamentation we ve heard throughout the history of verse, but her poetry nonetheless goes far beyond old-fashioned mourning songs. Over time her poems come to assert a new understanding: that Eliot s post-Romantic conception of poetic voice is circumscribed by an unrealistically thin band of expression, one that keeps poets from exploring the full spectrum of human feeling. Unfamiliar readers might think a poet would employ linguistic fireworks to depict so much energy-but not Shumaker. Since her first book, she has developed a cunning combination of conventional form and low-pitched voice. Together these traits help her to register a thorough appreciation of the natural world and an intensive bonding with other human beings. The newest poems, especially those dedicated to Eva Saulitis, the deceased marine biologist turned naturalist poet and memoirist, are-in their precise articulation of free affection-unlike any literary poetry being written today.
As this volume of new and selected poems demonstrates, Shumaker arrived at her current practice by first paying close attention to myriad nuances of organization and sound. In October, Snow, a highly representative poem from her surprisingly sophisticated first book Esperanza s Hair, the language intimates a multilayered relation to landscape. What happens outside of us happens inside of us:

Quiet snow takes on
the shape of the black branch
that s taking on snow.
This low
along the horizon,
the sun
seems hurt,
glazes one birch in last light.
First ice
across the Ch