Dancing at the Monastery

by Bakken, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9781931357388
• ISBN10: 1931357382
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-31
• Publisher: Univ Pr of New England

Summary

"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." --Richard Howard

Author Biography

CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN's first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.

Table of Contents

Theme song for an agrarian epic	p. 3
Anamnesis	p. 5
Eclogue	p. 9
Eclogue 2	p. 11
Eclogue 3 (cyclops)	p. 12
Eclogue 4 (goat funeral)	p. 13
Eclogue 5	p. 14
Eclogue 6	p. 16
Minimalist eclogue	p. 17
Eclogue 7 (matia)	p. 18
Eclogue 8 (winter)	p. 19
Eclogue 9	p. 20
Epode	p. 22
Days of 1987	p. 25
The blue Jay	p. 26
Amanita muscaria	p. 28
Anatomy	p. 29
Portrait detail, with pear	p. 32
Portrait detail, with bat	p. 33
The world reduced to one thing	p. 35
Duet with Fernando Pessoa	p. 39
Duet with Czeslaw Milosz	p. 40
Duet with D. H. Lawrence	p. 41
Blues for Bill Matthews, dead at 55	p. 42
Violin solo	p. 43
Parenthesis	p. 44
Paul Celan	p. 45
Duet with Salvatore Quasimodo	p. 46
Purgatory, a postcard	p. 49
Detail from The Martyrdom of San Mauricio, El Greco	p. 50
Coleridge in Valletta	p. 51
Azaleas	p. 52
Late Adam thinking	p. 54
First objects	p. 55
Ohio elegy	p. 56
Ariadne (postscript)	p. 58
Last words from Elpenor	p. 59
Aegean : flight 652	p. 60
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