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Kicking The Feather
by Duncan McNaughton ISBN 1-889960-01-2 paper, perfectbound, 48 pps --$10 |
"Duncan McNaughton's new poems turn to sympathy like a saunterer regaining balance step by step. Determination, yes, but the unexpected sweep, its bel canto ardor, catches the reader's plumb line: 'My friends far away saw the same full moon . . .' This is a book of cautions, 'the ship's Necessity' out of velvet fog."
--Bill Berkson
"Words that carry the touch of the illusion which is the sky."
--Jean Monod
Excerpts from Kicking The Feather
Clocking It
I'm travelling through a railway coach
tranquil air, soft clickety-clack
behind Gorecki's symphony of sad songs
drowned moth floating in a tumbler of water
I've just said I'm going to kill myself
I'm going to do everything I can not to
the challenge of despair irradiates the night
how many of us are there who are the simples
of the age and its conscience?
The motion of solemn music has drowned
the gentle noise of the coach
I have to pause to hear the rails
and feel the rocking of the train
it's an American train crossing Poland in the dark
"In Such A Quandary"
Hemmed in by a barely
invisible elecromagnetic
omniscience,
strapped--
if it's so one doesn't go out
save one goes in I am feeding on myself
that's the mistake, make
no mistake, we depend for our bodies upon sounds
for incarnation upon sounds that move across waters
still so cold one goes blue diving into the pools
which in the myriad depressions
across this upland moor
only now have melted
from the ice which lay over
holed up watching the end
of the end
of the last onslaught
for if we do not grasp on
to the form of our own beginning
we shall forfeit the actual world to inner psyche
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