Friday 28 August 2015

Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011), second selection

More favourite passages:


To be defiled is to be recognizable to yourself, she thought.


last line of "Evaporation 3"


Where do you think you come by your pattern?

from "Moving Around for the Light, a Madrigal"


Smoking is the Bosnian national sport. Everywhere the poets meet to read or discuss poetics, we look across the room at each other through soiled gauze.


from "Bosnia-Herzegovina: Life Is Waiting"


Hospitality's other face, hostility
And then stepped back, measuring him for a haymaker.

*

Each a stranger to the other's strangeness
And she strokes her horned toad in the direction of its spines.

from "Evaporation 4"


...a meadow softly-furred
as a bumble-bee....

*

        A song sparrow stops

                                                 anting its wing to fulfill

what silence wants, and look: the child's face,

                                                                her wet lips, her even teeth--

 from "Lovegreen"


...a languorous sine curve of a journey that ends with the brake-smoking descent into an abyss where the beleaguered town of Andacollo has been flung.

*

He started to imagine fighting sadistic force with poems as insubstantial as contrails over a city.

from "Chile: Pigs of Gold"




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