Collecting the Animals

by Everwine, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780887483240
• ISBN10: 0887483240
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr

Summary

The voice of these poems is clear and strong, rising as it does out of the earth to "the celebrations of the reeds," living simply and daily among cat-tail, wren, peacock, children, women, "praising the coals of heaven" before settling back like the old men of boyhood "wifeless and half wild, / In stained coats, dying like rainbows / from the feet up." These are poems of the real triumphs we seldom understand, the visions of dawn and dusk over the fields and cities where we live, poems that finally embrace even the emptiness "tasting its bitten face." The book also includes a group of superb reconstructions of Aztec poems which, like Everwine's own work, are sometimes so quiet they are merely a man speaking as plainly as he can of why he lives, and so exact as to be a poetry known long before poetry. That is why they are among the best we have today.

Table of Contents

The Condition	3	(4)
I
How It Is	7	(1)
The Heavy Angel	8	(1)
Home from Duck Marsh	9	(1)
Collecting the Animals	10	(1)
Back from the Fields	11	(1)
Judah	12	(1)
Dorothy	13	(1)
The Hatch	14	(1)
We Meet in the Lives of Animals	15	(4)
II THE AZTEC POEMS
The Clearing	19	(1)
To Tlaloc of the Rain	20	(1)
Hymn to the Sacred Birds	21	(2)
Hummingbird's Song/Screech-Owl's Song	23	(1)
To the Song Maker	24	(1)
Lament	25	(1)
Two Women's Songs	26	(1)
Two Poems by Nezahualcoyotl	27	(1)
Two Poems by Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin	28	(1)
Elegy for the Warrior Tlacahuepan	29	(1)
The City of Mexico	30	(1)
Moquihuitzin's Answer	31	(1)
Two Poems by Tochihuitzin Coyolchiuhqui	32	(3)
III
The Brother	35	(1)
Looking into things Clearly	36	(1)
The Children	37	(1)
At the Playground, Singing for Psychiatric Out-Patients	38	(2)
The Pets Keep Dying	40	(1)
Nightly Report from the Weather Bureau	41	(1)
Going	42	(1)
Getting There	43	(1)
One Morning, in the Alley Behind My House	44	(1)
You	45	(2)
Drinking Cold Water	47	(4)
IV
Toward Daybreak	51	(1)
Morning Song	52	(1)
Living by Water	53	(1)
The Marsh: New Year's Day	54	(1)
For the Coming Year	55	(1)
The Coat	56	(1)
Someone Knocks	57	(1)
The Gift	58	(1)
Learning to Speak	59	(1)
Just Before Sleep	60	(1)
Perhaps It's As You Say	61	(1)
Gray Poem	62