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    Omens in the Year of the Ox
    Omens in the Year of the Ox
    Omens in the Year of the Ox
    Ebook101 pages37 minutes

    Omens in the Year of the Ox

    By Steven Price

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    About this ebook

    Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.” The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateFeb 6, 2015
    ISBN9781771314039
    Omens in the Year of the Ox
    Author

    Steven Price

    Steven Price’s previous novel, By Gaslight, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, longlisted for the Giller Prize, and named a Book of the Year by NPR, CBC, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. He is the award-winning author of one other novel, Into that Darkness, and two collections of poetry. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his family.

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      Book preview

      Omens in the Year of the Ox - Steven Price

      Hass

      The Crossing

      I

      So. At the end of the middle of your life

      you wake, rain-shivering, to a white railing

      in a shriven dusk. A strangeness churning

      under the hull, the great blades boiling through

      ferruginous waters. So the ferries sail still

      in this late age, vast holds half-full of souls.

      And so you rise, each day, more than you were.

      Exhausted, maybe, into silence. When Bridges

      wrote, How is the world’s bright shift held

      in such a cluttered line? Hopkins, in a rage,

      had no answer. Or none beyond his poetry.

      Rain in silver ropes overrunning his faith,

      his metre marking long great gulps of night air.

      So the waters gulp at the mournful hull,

      so the rusted bolts bleed. You unfold both

      fists in the charred coastal dusk, watching

      a white chill krill across their skin. Bright shift,

      cluttered line. If the ill of the world issues

      up out of the world, then there is no course

      but to praise it. As Hopkins praised it. In the straits

      a slack foam froths blackly in the scum, and you

      who are water stare at that water, blurred

      by old hurts praise holds no part in, here

      at the edge of a dark crossing that is always

      evening. As if called to account for a life

      lived in the provinces. But there is no

      calling to account. You sway at a railing

      staring west, towards desolation, that is, forgetting.

      II

      In Gaudí’s Palau Güell, with her. How the walls

      wept into form, as you wandered hall to hall

      in that black building, astonished such a shape

      could hold. The built thing made bright shift of.

      Gaudí had given Güell an allegory of the cross,

      both sculpture and story. It was a spatial truth

      he’d sought: an ascension up, up

      seven stories towards the spires of heaven.

      That cellar with its termitic columns,

      that cellar where partisans were tortured,

      that cellar of sand, dust, stone: that was Hell.

      You rested under the white shards of pottery

      on Gaudí’s rooftop, watching a white cat pour

      past her ankles like blood-threaded milk

      while a red sun drenched the staggered chimneys.

      How she looked at you, suddenly perplexed.

      And when you asked, What is it? she laughed,

      having just forgotten what it was. Nothing,

      she said, meaning everything she already had.

      There is your desire, and her desire, and each

      touches many things. You carried Hopkins

      all through Spain, wanting to get closer

      to something. His stark Jesuit suffering, perhaps.

      Tracing your burned fingers along the cool

      ancient stones in the narrow streets

      of the Gothic Quarter, his music

      in your head. We believe we are living

      one life and learn too late we have been

      living another, she said. If all our pasts

      are possible pasts then we are no kind of gone.

      On Gaudí’s tiled roof she pointed past a line

      of smoky blue spires in the Barcelona haze,

      and you felt your future darken before you.

      Does it matter now if none of that is true?

      You know that you cannot, maybe, bring her

      into that city, where she was not. Still, there

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