Sleeping Late on Judgment Day Poems

by MAYHALL, JANE

• ISBN13: 9780375710483
• ISBN10: 0375710485
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-13
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

"My heart is bursting with homage as I / head off to a hostile eternity," writes Jane Mayhall, now eighty-five, who wrote most of these poems in an urgent outpouring over the last few years. From the decades-outdated subway token in the bottom of her shoulder bag, which calls forth earlier days in New York City, to the violin her father practiced among the pantry's jam jars in her Kentucky childhood, Mayhall plucks small treasures that bespeak her fierce devotion to life, with its clutter of memories and imperfections. In her tightly knotted, beautifully turned short poems, she elegizes a world not quite gone, and brings us into contact with some of her contemporaries, from Lincoln Kirstein to Theodore Roethke. Chief among her cherished memories is her long bohemian marriage, which she recalls in a series of ravishing love poems to her late husband. In lines saturated with feeling she describes how she accommodates her grief at losing him and, as throughout this exquisite volume, how we must continue to greet life, in all its gorgeous strangeness. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Jane Mayhall was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1918 and attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, Hofstra University, Morehead State University, and the Summer Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky. Her fiction and poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other publications.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

I. Healing and Light
Too Much Is Not Enough	3	(1)
Uncensored Note to Auden	4	(1)
Spending the Unspent	5	(1)
Token	6	(1)
In New York	7	(1)
The Apple Accident	8	(1)
The Whittled Forest	9	(1)
Experience	10	(2)
Wastebaskets
Righteousness Is Kleenex	12	(1)
The Cane	13	(1)
2001, a Backward Glance	14	(1)
The Tides of André Gide	15	(1)
Say	16	(1)
Protection (Elegy for James Still)	17	(1)
Brueghel's Games	18	(1)
My Nephew and His Wife	19	(1)
Photographer	20	(1)
Healing and Light	21	(1)
Picking Up	22	(1)
Crude Thoughts	23	(1)
Wish Fulfillment	24	(1)
William Stafford, Coincident with Easter	25	(1)
Unaccountably	26	(1)
To "Even"	27	(1)
Sun on the Kitchen Wall	28	(1)
Source Books	29	(1)
The Snow Goose	30	(1)
Shape of Sentences	31	(1)
"Never Apologize, Never Explain"	32	(1)
Miss P	33	(2)
Listening and Heeding	35	(1)
Like Oscar Wilde	36	(1)
Glad	37	(1)
A Distant Trumpet	38	(1)
Disobedience	39	(1)
Emergency Room Enjoyments	40	(1)
Ballad of Playing Tennis with Theodore Roethke at Yaddo	41	(1)
Opinion	42	(1)
Kirstein's Table	43	(1)
The First Death	44	(1)
Postcard from a Dream	45	(1)
Wendell and Schubert	46	(2)
Youth, Age	48	(1)
Presumptions	49	(1)
Vesper Hours	50	(1)
The Conrad Aiken Dream	51	(2)
Voice	53	(4)
II. Love Poems
Altar	57	(1)
The Risk	58	(1)
Notes for a Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary	59	(1)
His Speech	60	(1)
Species Talk	61	(1)
You Think That	62	(1)
The Beacon	63	(1)
The Forbidden	64	(1)
Paean	65	(1)
Sturdy Truth in a Rarified Fog	66	(1)
Untitled	67	(1)
Flesh and Nature	68	(1)
The Tree of Necessity	69	(1)
The Shelter	70	(2)
Early Spring	72	(1)
Why a Corner in the Apartment Puts Me to Sleep	73	(1)
Love Is	74	(1)
The Superstition	75	(1)
I Can't Distance Myself from You	76	(1)
The Guess	77	(1)
Leslie's Glance	78	(1)
Painkiller	79	(1)
The Gilded Shadow	80	(1)
At a Recent Cinema	81	(1)
The Comb	82	(1)
Easter Music	83	(1)
Grief	84	(1)
Inadvertent	85	(1)
Jingle Dream	86	(1)
Name	87	(1)
Occupancy	88	(1)
Pigeon Wings	89	(1)
Restoration of Trust	90	(1)
Renewed Hope	91	(1)
Serenade	92	(1)
Twilight Rain	93	(1)
Untitled 2	94	(1)
Polly's Legacy	95