Don Paterson, “The Poetry (after Li Po)”

I found him wandering on the hill
one hot-blue afternoon.
He looked as skinny as a nail,
as pale-skinned as the moon;

below the broad shade of his hat
his face was cut with rain.
Dear God, poor Du Fu, I thought:
It’s the poetry again.

Has it really been five years since Don Paterson’s last collection of poems? I was introduced to his work at a New British Poetry reading in late 2004. Rain was first published in the UK last year, around the same time the title poem appeared in The New Yorker; a few months later, the book won the Forward Poetry Prize. Then, in January 2010, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal, which is an actual gold medal, struck by the Royal Mint and everything.

This collection also includes “The Swing” (first published in Granta), “The Lie” (Poetry) and “Miguel, his own take on a Vallejo poem, just as the poem above is a rendition of Li Po. (In an essay for Poetry, Paterson discusses the liberties he took with Vallejo’s original verse.) You’ll also want to take a look at “Two Trees,” which, as Andrew Shields says, “teases the reader by apparently offering an extended metaphor before taking it back.

(Oh, if you’d like to see another version of that Li Po verse, follow the link I just gave you and scroll down. As for Du Fu, I featured a poem of his last year.)

22 March 2010 | poetry |

Jennifer Boyden, “Orectic”

From the throats of herons and lost wolves,
we learn of a mistake made by the gods.
They gave us red-winged birds and vesper
sparrows who make songs of leaf-light
and flying. The gods thought we’d be so happy—
all that fruit, one big garden,
our nakedness in sun and water.
They never counted on our needing a sound
for longing, too. They gave that to the loon,
to wild dogs whose teeth throb
from the light of the moon; they poured it
into the long necks of birds. How could they
have known? Where in our bodies
would they have moored the slender cry of the crane
who calls out that night is closing the sky,
taking away the glinted green
of the frogs’ moist backs, the dazzle the sun makes
of every hair, of every shining wing?

The Mouths of Grazing Things is the most recent recipient of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, which has been awarded annually since 1985. You can also read another of Jennifer Boyden’s poems, “Inside This Next Vase, Likely,” at Rattle, and three more poems (along with an appreciative essay) at Whistling Shade. (Weston Cutter, the author of that essay, expands on his admiration of Boyden’s poems at Corudroy Books.)

Orectic, by the way, is an adjective meaning “pertaining to desires and their satisfaction.”

15 March 2010 | poetry |