[New-Poetry] Fascinatin' Blurbage/Anstett

[Anny Ballardini]

Even if he is openly compromising at the end, Bill Knott is Bill Knott even in a short blurb.
  From: David Graham 
  Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 1:52 PM




  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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