Dark Energy: Poems - Brossura

Morgan, Robert

Brossura

ISBN 10: 014312806X ISBN 13: 9780143128069

Casa editrice: Penguin Books, 2015

Riassunto

A new collection from the awardwinning poet and author of the bestselling novel Gap Creek

In the words of Poetry magazine, Robert Morgan’s poems “shine with beauty that transcends locale.” The work in his newest collection, rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains, explores the mysteries and tensions of family and childhood, the splendors and hidden dramas of the natural world, and the agriculture that supports all culture. Morgan’s voice is vigorous and exact, opening doors for the reader, finding unexpected images and connections. The poems reach beyond surfaces, to the strange forces inside atoms, our genes, our heritage, and outward to the farthest movements of galaxies, the dark energy we cannot explain but recognize in our bones and blood, in our deepest memories and imagination.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

ROBERT MORGAN’s books include Boone, a biography of Daniel Boone, Gap Creek (an Oprah Book Club pick), and the poetry collection Terroir. The recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in Ithaca, New York.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

· CONTENTS

· ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

Big Talk

When mountains boomed and boomed again

returning echoes all along

the chain, the Indians said the peaks

were talking to each other in

the idiom that mountains use

across the mighty distances,

with giant syllables and rests.

White hunters feared it might be guns

or even cannon natives had

somehow acquired to warn them from

the better hunting grounds and streams,

the blasts as loud as thunder on

the clearest days and coldest nights.

Geologists would later hold

the groans and barks inside the ridge

were shelves of massive, restless rock

that slipped or dropped far down within

the mountain’s guts, a fracture or

a crashing at some fault as part

of the tectonic conversation

among the continents as old

as planet earth or starry birth,

the gossip of creation’s work.

Big Bone Lick

At Big Bone Lick the first explorers

found skeletons of elephants they said,

found ribs of woolly mammoths,

tusks of mastodons and ribs of sloths

that lurched across Kentucky once

near twenty feet from snout to tail.

They dug out teeth the size of bricks

and skulls of giant bison, beavers.

In salty mud licked bare by elk

and deer and buffalo and bears

for ten millennia, the bones

seemed wreckage from a mighty dream,

a graveyard from a golden age,

or killing ground of titans. Here

they saw the ruins of a world

survived by its diminutives,

where Eden once gave way and shrank

to just a regular promised land

to fit our deadly, human scale.

Jaguar

Where Lawson, Bartram, others wrote

they saw a “tiger” in the hills

and woods of Carolina I

assumed they meant a panther or

a bobcat, never guessed there were

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Penguin Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 014312806X
• ISBN 13: 9780143128069
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 96