From "Second Draft":
What other people learn
From birth,
Betrayal, My soul perched
On an olive branch
Combing itself,
Waving its plumes. I said
Being mortal, Mortal things.
Said my soul,
If you’ re telling the truth.
"Draft of a Letter" is a book about belief— not belief in the
unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering
the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems discover
infinitude in the most familiar places. The revelation is
disorienting and, as a result, these poems talk to themselves,
revise themselves, fashioning a dialogue between self and soul that
opens outward to include other voices, lovers, children, angels,
and ghosts. For James Longenbach, great distance makes the messages
we send sweeter. To be divided from ourselves is never to be alone.
“ If the kingdom is in the sky, ” says the body to the soul, “
Birds will get there before you.” “ In time, ” says the awakening
soul, “ I liked my second / Body better / Than the first.” To live,
these poems insist, is to arise every day to the strange
magnificence of the people and places we thought we knew best.
"Draft of a Letter" is an unsettled and radiant paradiso, imagined
in the death-shadowed, birth-haunted middle of a long life.
Praise for "Fleet"" River"
“ A sensibility this cogent, this subtle and austere is rare; even
rarer is its proof that poetry still flows through all things and
transforms all things in the process.” — Carol Muske-Dukes," Los
AngelesTimes Book Review"
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