World without end : poems / Claude Wilkinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilkinson, Claude, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (80 pages)

Place of Publication:

2020.

Eugene, Oregon : Slant Books, [2020]

Summary:

World Without End, Claude Wilkinson's fourth poetry collection, takes its title from the last words of the Gloria Patri. But the preceding words--"as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be"-- also echo the book's overarching theme: the seemingly infinite spiritual implications woven throughout our experience in the natural world. The poems are organized into meditations on family and community, spiritual worldviews, art and its insights, and nature's endless source of ever-relevant metaphor. The poems also speak to each other across these sections--and even with poems in Wilkinson's earlier collections. World Without End opens with "Among Other Things, My Father Teaches Me How to Mow Grass, " exploring the relationship of father and son, something that is revisited later on in "Salvia." Both poems long for conciliation between father and son through yard work--restoring order in the garden, a lost Eden.Wilkinson's gift for ekphrastic poetry remains strong in World Without End, though here it is more referential and allusive. Rather than engaging specific works of art, the poet strives to understand the broader aesthetic visions of figures like Theodore Dreiser, Vincent Van Gogh, and Walter Anderson. In the title poem, a reference to Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom suggests art's ephemeral yet sustaining power--and an irrepressible yearning for a return to paradise.

Contents:

Intro

I

Snow

Remembering My Mother Cleaning Fish

Lenten

Salvia

Heaven and Earth

Eclipse

Auspice

A Flight of Doves for Sherley Guy

Four-leaf Clovers in Bibles

Among Other Things, My Father Teaches Me How to Mow Grass

II

Covenant

A Fledgling Ornithologist Attempts to Explain the Difference between Birds and Angels

Praise

Watching a Rosarian Prune Canes

Sunday Morning Wildflowers

Driving Home While Thinking of a Sermon I Had Just Heard on How God Even Looks After All the Animals Too When a Butterfly Collides with My Car's Windshield

Prophecy

Psalm

III

In the Beginning, Audubon

Theodore Dreiser Watches a Lobster Kill a Squid in an Aquarium

Rumiesque Perhaps Told in thunderclap by the holy will of rain clouds that sew such bright evidence with quilts of flowers, there seems something we ought to learn, then learn to follow.

Walter Anderson Regrets Killing a Sea Turtle

Theories on How Venus de Milo Lost Her Arms

Vincent's Flowers

IV

Weed

Wasps

A Guide for Listening to Mockingbirds

The Love Life of Moss

Flower Moon

Internecine

Destroying Angel

Duet

Dragonflies Hunting

Live Bait

Cottonmouth

Montego Bay

The Goliath Bird-Eating Spider

The Mud Dauber and the Moth

A Hunter with a 23½-Pound Wild Turkey Heads toward His Boat Near Big Island on the Mississippi River

Deer Crossing

Thusness

Forecast

Revelation

Winter Field White with Snow Geese

World Without End

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Wilkinson, Claude World Without End

ISBN:

9781639820382

OCLC:

1293241266