Pastoral Habits Poems / George Drew.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Drew, George, author.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry.

American poetry--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 187 pages)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Huntsville, Texas : Texas Review Press, [2016]

Summary:

Just as an orchard grower, when harvesting its fruit, discards the tart, the bitter, the overripe, and the stunted, so, too, any poet tries to judiciously rejected less-than-sterling poems when assembling his Selected. Pastoral Habits is a Selected of carefully chosen poems from fifty years and five volumes of poetic harvests. If "pastoral" connotes good shepherding, or good harvesting, then George Drew's collection with, like various varieties of fruit, includes poems about Michelangelo, Physics, Russia, all things American and the natural world, will resonate for those who value the worlds of poetry, from lyric to dramatic to narrative, and whether as background or central, the pastoral. "Few books of poetry as good as Pastoral Habits will come out this year, perhaps none better."-- X. J. Kennedy THE PIETÀ Mother, have you looked on this masterpiece? Seen how you hold me as you did when I was but a child? Here joy has been exiled, and sorrow set upon the throne. You will not see it on your perfect brow draped by its kerchief. Nor on your firm chin, nor in your inward-looking marble eyes, nor even in my horror-riddled shape draped like a smock across your lap. Now do you see it? There--in your left hand: the fingers splayed like broken wings, the deeply chiseled lifeline, and the blood, or shadow, smudging palm and fingertips. Here, mother, piety and pity are the same.

Contents:

New poems. Pastoral habits

The importance of storytelling in the Ddeep South

Possum

the simply crazy

Why do we call it Agent Orange?

The world after Mama

How I would keep the maybe one-eighth Choctaw part of me alive

Women like her

Antigone on Tinker Street

Meeting Will Nixon

Meeting Darrell Bourque

Doing a blurb for Jared

High math at Blue Mountain Lake

Ode to moss

Just one lousy apple

The woman in the black dress

The young poet with a New Age name

Silver

Talking to God on the old storm king

God in the hands of an angry sinner

Anne Bradstreet in Barnes & Noble

Jack's last book

Reading a Pulitzer Prize finalist on the Garden State

On my way to Hudson

Incident on Wilbur Flats Road.

The view from Jackass Hill (2011). The older I get the more I think of Keats

From "Three for Jack". Hey, Jack

Montpelier

Elegy for Michael

After seeing Bright star at the Spectrum Theater

Blessed

Dark thoughts under the basswood tree

Flood-wood

Fishing the tracks

Making do in Petticoat Lane

The view from Jackass Hill

From "Elegy for joyce". Real cherry

The dark up here

RC's girl

Making up with Milton

Ripeness

Digging Andy

The way forward

This truly crappy pastoral ode

Reading Jared in the middle of the night.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome (2010). Condivi

Torrigiano

Lodovico

The Pietà

Julius II

Erasmus and Dürer: a dialog

The blackmailer

The sacred and the profane

The brothers

The assistant

The sisters.

American cool (2009). Exactly (a pastoral rumination)

Ghost calls

Fort William Henry, Pemaquid

Epistle to Peter Snyder

The distances across which all the atoms dance

Giving it up in paradise

Laying it down in paradise

To Stella, Laura, Julia, Beatrice, and the Dark Ladie

Sleeping with Nancy

Our daughter is becoming Elvis

Like a silent movie based on a slow-moving chapter of a bad novel

The woman the blues are about

It's raining in Detroit

Coleridge at the autumn picnic of the society of Druids

I've never used the word shabby before

Huff

Gargoyles

American cool

Master class.

The horse's name was Physics (2006). The horse's name was Physics

Wild beasts in the ruined cornfields

Clara' s calling

The icehouse

The night that nature spoke

The birds of passage

The different meanings of the word I

The day the sand began to hop

FDR & me

Ahimsa

Beyond the fields of bright aster

The journey of death.

So many bones: poems of Russia (1997). Among Russians

The soldiers of God have come to Russia

To Irina

The tank

The smoked fish

Kopecks

At Tolstoy's grave

The Russian word for sun

My first real kiss in Russia.

Toads in a poisoned tank (1986). The drowning of Christopher French

From "Sea creatures". A small and white-grained beach ; High tea with Mrs. Rosie O'Shea

From "A death on campus". Theodore Whyland ; Either you fall in the river of despair or you walk on the water like Christ

Talking with Nepo

Looking into James Wright's hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

To a writer from Maine

To a fisherman

From "Southern roots". Mr. Clarence ; Miss Jennie ; Falling in love with Aunt Joyce ; Learning to box with Gus ; Mr. Jason ; Mr. Red

From "Northern branches". The giving of Uncle Melvin ; A short unhappy history of Uncle Frank ; A very special case ; Well, Daddy.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68003-080-9

OCLC:

1164583990