Exigent Futures : New and Selected Poems

by Heller, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781876857516
• ISBN10: 187685751X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

This book gathers together poems from four of Michael Heller's major collections along with some new work from this remarkable poet. An air of profound elegy, loss and remembrance permeates Heller's work. Reader's will delight in the care and weight of this lonely, beautiful voice, and the triumphs of love in its patient recounting.

Table of Contents

From Accidental Center

In the Difficulties

Pressure:

Maro Spring

Paragraphs

The Body: A Fable

The Autumn of Apollinaire

Incontinence

from Knowledge

Knowledge

Florida Letter

Question and Answer before Threnody

Bialystok Stanzas

After Montale

The Mind's Return

Postulates

Stanzas om Mount Elbert

Near Guernsey, Wyoming

On the Beach

from In the Builded Place

Father Parmenides

Moon Study

Coral Stanzas

The Bright Light at the Point

The Acoustics of Emptiness

Well-Dressing Rounds

Mythos of Logos

After Plato

Homer Timeless

In Central Park

Jury Duty in Manhattan

Adulation

Strophes from the Writings of Walter Benjamin

For Paul Blackburn

In the School

Outside a Classroom in Nerja

Tourist's Cave

Statue: Jardin du Luxembourg

Climb to an Ancient Chateau in France

Fifty-Three Rue Notra Dame de Nazareth

Accidental Meeting with an Israeli Poet

Palestine

In a Dark Time, On his Grandfather

For Uncle Nat

Constellations of Waking

Two Swans in a Meadow by the Sea

A Night for Chinese Poets

January Nights

Late Visit

Being at East Hampton

This Many Colored Brush Which Once forced the Elements

Water, Heads, Hamptons

Partitions

Miami Waters

Father Studies

In Elegiacs, Birds of Florida

from Wordflow

Lecture with Celan

Leaving the Museum

Stanzas at Maresfield Gardens

Without Ozymandias

At the Muse's Tomb

In Paris

Prony's Calculations

Thinking of Mary

Partents' Grave

One Day, What you Said to Yourself

She

To Postmodernity

Classical Theme

Sag Harbor, Whitman, as if an Ode

New Poems

Cyclical

"We cano only wish valeat quantum valere potest." Autobiographia

Winter Notes, East End

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Stanzas on Mount Elbert Where we climbed in the berserk air Of trails, sharp spiky views And dizzying vertigo. I watched Marmot and pika dart Among lichen covered rocks Envying not their agility But that they survive On such apparent bleakness. Then, seeing you on the path above, Aspen crook in hand, orange poncho Bannered to the wind, the painter's Famous Wanderer in the Clouds , Whatever passes between us, Whoever you are, in that moment You were a guide to me. We took The path six inches at a time: with each Breath a step; with each step a breath, Sounds of ourselves reverberating In hollows, in great brown cratered cups of rock Until what was human seemed to be passing Into its sheer facticity. And by the summit, head abuzz in thin air, Pain or joy or confusion heaped as one Into the round bulge Of the mountain's endlessness, it was Almost too comical to have walked there, To worship at that feast of obstacles. And the lakes four thousand feet below Leered crazily. I think We were looking back At what does or does not exist, What the mind mirrors; something To which we do not so much return As turn to, though the turning hurts.