Sanskrit of the body / W.B. Keckler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keckler, W. B.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

National poetry series

The national poetry series

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

77 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Penguin Books, 2003.

Summary:

In This Mesmerizing Debut Collection, Chosen By Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series, W. B. Keckler crafts an expansive travelogue of the human spirit that moves thoughtfully through multiple ages, cultures, and beings. Each poem explores in depth, through pensive, evocative images, aspects of the human condition and their place within the rich continuum of animal existence. Keckler presents these poems in a fugal form, uniting the individual works in what he describes as a "holistic formalism" that reveals the poems' powerful collective meaning. Lives and afterlives are explored with equal care as Keckler attempts to restore the concept of "spirit" in a modern world often overwhelmed by materialistic priorities.

Contents:

"A small boy amuses himself" 3

"A rose over mica-flecked sand nods" 4

"This way her galaxy of mind shuts off" 5

"The railroad tracks recede in a pale blue" 6

"The pigeons fake an Annunciation in this shadow" 7

"She talks to herself all night" 8

"Which are the stories you keep" 9

"How old is this darkness anyway?" 10

"Plant ghosts signal fractally to us" 11

"Now you walk the floors of public institutions" 12

"Drunken boaters who land there all summer" 13

"When your spine's magnesium finally ignites" 14

"I wrestle with many problems, lately" 15

"There stands a column of salt in desert" 16

"Crickets outside tonight speak to stars" 17

"Mourning doves purr in a slant of morning dark" 18

"It is an odd joy to read writing predating" 19

"The privacy of a penitentiary that shadows" 20

"They have adapted cold electricity" 21

"Sorrow is revealed here in the spectral energy" 22

A Whale's Fin, An Ibis Wing, A Leaf

"And then you divide again, as water" 25

"All of this happened with a nebulous sense of space" 26

"Is it because of this, a candle's flickering" 27

"Our differing voice patterns and weights" 28

"Sun left floaters, spangled fire" 29

"Spun-out obsidian wires vex a city" 30

"The lover, he is beginning to build a bridge" 31

"Another false start, the way mosaics" 32

"The distance between the rails of a railroad" 33

"I think my answer to the soul is the epidermis" 34

"All afternoon and blue evening" 35

"Why worry about distinctions when the train" 36

"Ants kept coming out of the tap marked "C" 37

"And then she thought, yes, life consists only of that" 38

"She woke up with the idea of an owl" 39

"Because you want a body's shadow on this white paper" 40

"A familiar voice may be parsed to infinite particles" 41

"I have fallen, but do not help me" 42

"You come to agree with the fish imagery" 43

The Spider Carries Nothing but Hunger

The Hand 47

The Library 48

A Poem I Later Realize is about Arshile Gorky 49

Naturopathy 50

Altered Bronk 52

Morning Rain Ticking 53

Just Watching As 54

Variant 55

In Beginning 56

Theater in the New World 57

Seams 58

2:29 A.M. 59

You Were Thinking How 60

The Gods 61

American Nocturne

"A kinetic sculpture is mounted" 65

"A tiny mechanical biplane circles a planet" 66

"Inside, it feels as though every room" 67

"Parrots in her yellow window" 68

"A moth splays against an apartment window" 69

"Someone shoves a little boat into the winter river" 70

"A hand goes deeper inside the nude" 71

"Sugar spills on a Ouija board" 72

After

"A Wedding" 75.

ISBN:

0142003034

OCLC:

51810705