Draft of a Letter
From Second Draft:
What other people learn
From birth,
Betrayal,
I learned late.
My soul perched
On an olive branch
Combing itself,
Waving its plumes. I said
Being mortal,
I aspire to
Mortal things.
I need you,
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 Angeles Times Book Review
The English-Speaking Union: Ambassador Book Awards
Short Listed
“Looking at the flowering branch of a yucca plant, the poet, launched on his ‘second lifetime,’ becomes aware of ‘Cells dying / By the million, / Sloughed, replaced,’ and records how ‘by listening / I was changed forever, / Forever the same.’ James Longenbach’s dazzling lyrics draw their strength from the charged zone where change and permanency meet. The necessary coexistence of these two states results in poetry as inevitable and precise as a flower.”—John Ashbery
“A delicate and severe book composed under the protection of Petrarch. Longenbach plays an eerie, stylized, almost timeless diction against statements of stark immediacy: ‘I need you, / Said my soul, / If you’re telling the truth.’ These are poems of paradoxical quiet and intensity, Mediterranean in temper, classical, in tune with life and with death: ‘Poppies in front of him, / Bones behind.’”—Rosanna Warren
“Don’t let this book fool you: what animates it is numinous contemplative balance or equilibrium. The eloquent glimpses it contains of the phenomenal world, or of autobiography, have nothing to do with the conventions of narrative, of description or representation as they are ordinarily practiced. A young man’s apprehension of his body; the mysterious confluence of two mortal souls; balance that the person experiencing the balance barely understands. This book, sung in an American dolce stil nuovo, finds its equilibrium in the apprehension of opposites at once: ‘The root of need / Is plenitude, she said.’ Only the most elemental divisions register here, informing the gaze of these ecstatic, beautiful, haunting poems.”—Frank Bidart
Ice Men
Death and Reason
Draft of a Letter
The Gift
Canzone
Joy and Reason
Buried Life
O Tourist
Self and Soul
The Gods in Exile
Ghost Pond
Swallowtail
II
Reason and Sorrow
Complaint
Second Draft
Abacus
Tenzone
Yard Work
Sparrow
Second Life
A Different Route
Self and Soul
Testament
After Petrarch
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | Poetry
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