|
Bulle/Chimére by James Thomas Stevens ISBN 1-889960-12-8 $16 + $2 p/h |
A brilliant new collection of poems by the author of TOKINISH, COMBING THE SNAKES FROM HIS HAIR, (dis)ORIENT, MOHAWK/SAMOA: TRANSMIGRATIONS (with Caroline Sinavaiana) and other books. Bulle (bubble) / Chimére (chimera) represents some of the most arresting of Stevens's deeply sensuous and intricately crafted poetry--a return to "the personal" that offers an acute reminder of the heights and breadths of intensity that human love can attain.
Excerpts from Bulle/Chimére
Niagara
A dumb boat sloughs
through the spume below
and I understand, of a sudden,
how we maneuver
these, our sleek and sentimental crafts
through thick herds of strangers.
It happens near a waterfall
mid-roar of the torrents,
or waiting for a group
or one within that group.
Watching myself wanting, so far
from my own perception.
And you arrive laughing, lost
in experience, bedizened for the descent.
Oh Aeolus. Oh cave. Oh honeymoon'd den. Oh wind.
Sweet sighted and insect eyed,
from the spray
across this basin of green,
I pass you walking
the opposite direction
on these wet rails
and catch a thousand
images of you, inverted,
your hand too close to hers.
My eyes all mythology now. Orblets of Echo.
You didn't mean to burst my...
Bulle I
-- A pressurized spherical ellipsoidal entity
held in coherent shape by surface tension.
The eye, its pupils, how we become
dolled in each other's
dogged glances.
Orphans all,
in the eye's complicity with the heart.
Oh pupil. Oh small self. Oh pupille of pupilla or pupillus. Small dolls of our selves reflected in wet tension. Girandoled desire, twinned, in the parlour of the face.
And does the centre hold in coherent shape
when multiplied manifold
in the orbs of an other?
Life is more complicated than it felt Friday night.
All First Intensity publications are distributed by:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh St.
Berkeley, CA 94710-1403
email: orders@spdbooks.org
Or send orders to:
Lee Chapman, editor
First Intensity
P.O. Box 665
Lawrence, KS 66044
e-mail: leechapman@aol.com
please add $2 postage and handling
for the first book + 50 cents per additional book