Flying over Sonny Liston : Poems

by SHORT GARY

• ISBN13: 9780874172850
• ISBN10: 0874172853
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nevada Pr

Summary

Winner of the Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Liston explores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and some times heartbreaking task of being human in the modern world, in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the vast and often abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.

Table of Contents

I FROM THE GROUND
Psalm	3	(3)
Little Makeweights of Guilt	6	(1)
Gathering	7	(2)
Near the Bravo 20 Bombing Range	9	(1)
Birds	10	(1)
Tidings	11	(2)
Church	13	(2)
One Summer	15	(2)
Out of Night	17	(1)
Elegy for My Mother	18	(5)
II FALLEN LIGHT
The Stars That Fell	23	(2)
Vespers	25	(1)
White	26	(3)
Gentle	29	(3)
Dust	32	(1)
Wovoka	33	(2)
Outside	35	(1)
Rain	36	(2)
Given Back	38	(1)
Hard Winter	39	(6)
III BELIEF OF SKY
Erotica	45	(2)
Shoshonean	47	(1)
Naming	48	(2)
American Light	50	(2)
The Giant Ants of Texas	52	(2)
Flying Over Sonny Liston	54	(2)
In the Gradual	56	(2)
Watching the Ax Fall	58	(2)
A New Kind of Delicate	60	(2)
Driving Nevada/Reprise	62	(1)
Found in Any Gray	63	(4)
Acknowledgments	67