Cold Pastoral: Poems
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY)
A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster.
On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral.
In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.”
Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.
Related to Cold Pastoral
Related ebooks
You Must Remember This: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vapor Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Milk Hours: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCeremony for the Choking Ghost: Poems by Karen Finneyfrock Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Creature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Taste of River Water: new and selected poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Guard The Mysteries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Most of It Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ordinary Beast Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5No Object Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Grief, the Sun Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wendys Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrances of the Blast Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incorrect Merciful Impulses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forage House Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNight Burial Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Piece of Good News: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heard-Hoard Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5L' Heure Bleue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wideawake Field: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night Picnic: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sycamore: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Necessity of Wildfire: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBone Map: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come on All You Ghosts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5allegiance Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Poetry For You
The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Cold Pastoral
3 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Cold Pastoral - Rebecca Dunham
MNEMOSYNE TO THE POET
For you, memory is but
an oil lamp to snuff, left to
smoke. Diademed by earth’s
velvet mantle. So easy
for you to ignore: hadal
press of sea, the open
vein’s plumes,
how they wheel like
a maelstrom up and down.
My sight spills through
waves of old, blown
glass. I am not permitted
to turn, pillow to cheek,
and wait for sleep to find me.
Am not permitted
to learn how not to look.
ELEGY, WIND-WHIPPED
May 23, 2011, Joplin, Missouri
1. REFUSE
Doll hair—brown yarn—
loops round a hickory’s jagged
limb and she dances
the wind like a human body
clinched above
the gallows. See—your own
eyes stitched open as hers—
there is no difference, batting
or flesh, still you will
hang, emptied by my breath.
She could be dead. Easily
she could be your daughter.
2. HAMPSHIRE TERRACE
Search and mark with a spray-
painted X. Nothing left
to salvage. You do not like
to say it, but you need
the dogs. No tools you possess
can help you find silence.
We’re always hopeful but we briefed
the guys to plan for the worst.
Crowbar, chainsaw, chisel
you dig, hail beating.
In time, you think,
please let me be in time.
3. LIST
Tilt, slant, heel—a careening, a leaning, to one side. Incline. To please, to like, to desire. To cut away in narrow strips, stave and plank, to shear. To lister: to furrow the land—plow and drill—drop and cover. Who is the one that compiles? Roll clouds scroll the sky. Call it and we will listen: anything but there is no list, there is no