Granted

by Szybist, Mary

• ISBN13: 9781882295371
• ISBN10: 1882295374
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Alice James Books

Summary

Using natural, biblical, and classical imagery, these poems explore the difficulties of faith and love-particularly the difficulties of their expression, their performance. Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic-however quirky or strange. "This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition-to overcome by the quietest of means."-Donald Justice In Tennessee I Found a Firefly Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung to the dark of it: the legs of the spider held the tucked wings close, held the abdomen still in the midst of calling with thrusts of phosphorescent light- When I am tired of being human, I try to remember the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them central in my mind where everything else must surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose there are grips from which even angels cannot fly. Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase. When I am tired of only touching, I have my mouth to try to tell you what, in your arms, is not erased "This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition-to overcome by the quietest of means."-Donald Justice

Table of Contents

Mutatis Mutandis	1	(1)
What If I Could Look at You	2	(2)
Naked and Unashamed Are Two Different Moments	4	(1)
Swamp	5	(1)
What the World Is For	6	(2)
Raiment	8	(1)
Idealized Head	9	(1)
Twelfth Night from the Willow Cabin	10	(2)
First Confession	12	(1)
His Animals	13	(1)
Long After the Donkey and Desert	14	(2)
When I Was a Spoon in My Mother's Kitchen	16	(2)
Crylight	18	(1)
Via Negativa	19	(1)
Monologue to be Spoken by an Archangel	20	(1)
Again, the Body as Temple	21	(2)
Script Says Cry	23	(1)
Against Bitterness	24	(2)
In the Glare of the Garden	26	(1)
Response to Sunlight	27	(1)
First Mardi Gras	28	(2)
The Way One Picks Up a Shell on the Beach	30	(1)
The Mouths of Carp	31	(1)
Approaching Elegy	32	(2)
Heaven in Miniature	34	(2)
Withdrawal	36	(2)
Apology	38	(1)
On Gravity	39	(1)
Train Station, Reno: Early December	40	(2)
``... What a Lovely Way You Have of Putting Things''	42	(1)
Our Lady of the Milk	43	(1)
The Technique of the Lifelike	44	(1)
The Waiting	45	(2)
Wafian as in Waven as in Wif	47	(2)
Self-Portrait with a Bee in My Mouth	49	(2)
Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants	51	(3)
In Tennessee I Found a Firefly	54	(3)
Notes	57