Fear of Moving Water
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http://www.windpub.com/books/movingwater.htm
He is a poet to be reckoned with, and he is worth every nuance of the serious reader's reckoning. This is a book that compels our reading, and our re-reading."
--Martin Lammon, Arts & Letters editor
"I've always believed that poetry depends on two truths: the probity of
mystery versus obscurity, and the musical resonance of words within
the poetic line or phrase. Alex Grant probes a menagerie of mystery
in these poems, and among the younger poets I've encountered, he is
more finely attuned to the music of poetry than most. He is a poet to
be reckoned with, and he is worth every nuance of the serious reader's
reckoning. This is a book that compels our reading, and our re-reading."
--Martin Lammon, Arts & Letters editor
“Alex Grant is a fabulist who spins language acrobatically into tales,
tales into music, music into myth. Reading him(preferably aloud)
is pure pleasure for the imagination, the mouth and the mind”.
- Susan Ludvigson
“If you value linguistic fluency, the flow of the English language along
the warp of syntax, the weaving of image and rhythm into a tapestry
of sound, you will find yourself immersed in Fear of Moving Water.
Alex Grant brings his keen sense of language to every poem and
he writes unashamedly out of the sheer pleasure of that language.
Where does a poem's sense of place begin? In the naming of things.
Grant names the world in all its multitudinous glories and terrors.
Reading his poems kindles our desire to live again in that world”.
- Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate & author of Coming to Rest
“These historically savvy, philosophically ambitious poems
demonstrate as much linguistic and syntactical dexterity
as they do an expansive literary mind at work. Alex Grant
casts his visionary net far and wide, capturing the dark
and shimmering...”
-Dorianne Laux, author of Facts About the Moon: Poems
Book Excerpt:
argentina’s huge beaver problem
Giant Beavers Flood Land of Fire – Reuter’s
Whether this title relates to outsized rodents
or some enormous beaveresque conundrum
withers if you know that in Tierra Del Fuego
they pay a dollar a tail, a gnawing diminution
of this “large aquatic rodent of the genus Castor”
(fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan - born
from an egg with Pollux, his twin -- protectors
of sailors, whose brotherly love flickers nightly
in the constellation Gemini, under whose white
stars gauchos tote their boleadoras, beef-hooves
waiting for entanglement – spindly fore-legs
propping up mounds of meat in this bloody
menagerie – etymology old French ménage –
add in à trois and we’re back to the beaver.)
At The End of the World, the Pampas
are flooding – the Paranà river gushing
over cut-banks of Lenga and Guindo -
oceans pouring into oceans, flat-land
inundation in the mouth of black water,
ground down by the smallest white teeth.
Neruda’s suicide note
- In memory of Spalding Gray
They say nothing ever changes
but your point of view.
Nothing – “some thing
that has no existence” –
this makes no sense.
I sit in the catacumbas
and listen to the rain
pound the papaya leaves -
my skin like confetti,
my heart a cheap lottery.
I have seen the tiger’s stripes –
they live between
the fine linen sheets
of an office-girl’s bed,
in the afternoon fumblings
of someone who is no-one,
with a heart bursting
like a red balloon
on a tap – the pieces fly
in all directions, you cover
your face with your hand,
and it sticks to your skin
like confetti, like phosphorus
launched from a Greek warship,
like the skin of a plum
peeled by a broken nail.
giant
I read once that garden midges only live for around
ten minutes, and as I watched a swarm of them, I picked
one out, kept my eyes fixed on him, lit a cigarette, and tried
to imagine his life. I did the math, and decided that eight
midge seconds equaled one of our years, and as he moved
from the top to the bottom of the cloud, he had two affairs
and a nervous breakdown right there. He spiraled up again,
and by the time he’d reached the top, he’d sent all seventeen-
hundred of his children to a fashionable private swarm in the
upper reaches of a more desirable neighboring tree. He’d
gained a little weight by now, and couldn’t fly quite as fast
as he used to, but he compensated by quietly negotiating
his own private air-space, and by employing some of the
younger midges to bite people for him. By the time my
cigarette had burned less than half-way down, he’d written
a number of wildly successful self-help flying manuals,
as well as his acclaimed study of midge relationships –
‘Female midges are from the eastern boughs, male midges
are from the western.’ He’d had liposuction and wing implants
by this time, and was campaigning tirelessly to have the trashy
cloud in the next tree publicly censured. His therapist advised
him to adopt a lower public profile, but he was insistent that
he alone had secured the swarm’s tenure of the tree, and that
the other midges ought to damn-well recognize his contribution
and reward him accordingly. He died three quarters of the way
into my cigarette, convinced that the rest of the swarm
were plotting to run him down with a golf-cart.
He was truly a giant among midges.
_________________________________________________________
They were fishing the bodies out for days – bloated curds of humanity.
The salt had turned most of them white. Random immensity of the world.
Scientists now claim there’s a universe closer to your skin than the clothes
you wear – this may explain why you feel like someone else is in the room.
And time never was a straight line - it bends like a piece of elbow spaghetti –
the big noodle, cosmic boomerang, good old time.
__________________________________________________________
His holiness the abbot
is shitting in the withered fields
- after Buson
The mortal frame, the Haiku Masters hold,
is made up of one hundred bones
and nine orifices.
The mind this frame contains can be used,
or not used, to make the poem,
or become the poem.
Becoming is accomplished without thought,
making requires the application
of intent and will.
All change comes from objects in motion.
To capture the thing at rest, you
must be moving.
So, 7 days bereaved, Issa made his father’s
death poem: “A bath when you’re born,
a bath when you die – how stupid.”
Grief is a silk neckerchief covering a burn
around the throat, holding sound
down in the body.
And so we make these sounds without
thought – the heretic body burns,
intends, and moves.
Author Comment:
Ten years in the making, this collection includes many prize-winning poems.
Topics/Categories:
fabulism, History, Magical Realism, metaphysics, Poetry
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Original Publish Date:
September 11, 2009
Publishing Notes:
To be published by September 11th.
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