[New-Poetry] Fascinatin' Blurbage/Anstett

[David Graham]

One of my favorite poets, Aaron Anstett, has just published his third  
collection:  *Each Place the Body's*, from Ghost Road Press.
(http://www.ghostroadpress.com/catalog.htm)

In addition to the delights of the poems themselves, the book carries  
a classic blurb from none other than sometime NewPo Bill Knott:

"As this collection shows, Aaron Anstett is writing better poems than  
I am, so by rights he should be doing blurbs for me, not me for him.   
In truth that's not much of a recommendation, so forgive the  
incongruity when I say to you the potential reader that I hope you  
will enjoy reading this book as much as I did."

And here's a poem from the book--


Miguel Hernandez, In Tree, Makes Nightingale Calls for Pablo Neruda

        for Jim Ciletti

Years before, but not so many,
jail and dying
of lung disease, loneliness,
grief, Miguel Hernandez,

goat-herder from any village, Spain,
familiar with the stinks,
scrambles Madrid branches and mimics
a bird no larger than his heart

for the visiting Chilean whose native
climate prevented such songs.
“Hoo-hoo-plip-pflip…”
my friend tried to imitate,

like clarinet jazz,
and eerie, outside a bar
in Pueblo, Colorado,
after shots of Eastern European,

familiar-with-random-death
liquor. Vehicles could run on it,
that plum brandy, Sli-sli-slivovitz.
Miguel Hernandez climbed another tree

to be a second nightingale answering
and Pablo Neruda listened
again to a call so softly mournful
Keats might have dreamed it

his last, alert minutes. The April 1898
British journal *Birds* claimed,
“They cannot endure
captivity, nine-tenths of those caught

dying within a month.”
Neruda’s *Memoirs* do not say
whether Hernandez balanced on his heels,
bent his arms triangular, flapped imaginary wings.


--Aaron Anstett.  *Each Place the Body's*.  Ghost Road Press, 2007.


========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



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