Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero
Poems
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The critically acclaimed poet and translator Brooks Haxton embraces life, from our naked beginnings to the first signs of middle age and beyond, in this inviting collection of poems. The book opens with the dramatic birth of twins, and speaks in the intimate voice of a husband, father, and poet. Diverse products of the imagination pass through Haxton’s generous mind—the mysterious number zero, Milton’s “Lycidas,” nuclear technology—even as he captures the humor and pathos of the everyday. In these brief, exquisite lyrics, meditations, and short stories in verse, he immerses his reader in the heat of teenage rivalry and friendship, the tender comedy of sex, and the amazements of the natural world. Here, from a book indelible in its language and feeling, are the last few lines:
My daughters my twin girls say Ba for bird
for book for bottle—Ba: in Egypt,
bird with a human head, the soul.
They wake and wake their mother. Ba!
They point into the dark. Ba, Ba! they say,
and back to nursing weary in her arms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The overt themes of this book are fairly well laid out by the title: the body and its limitations, and what Haxton calls "displacement volumetrics," the space taken up by the self. This is familiar lyric territory: births, death, regrets spaces where "a dark and an indifferent/ Cold came making themselves/ a place with room for us." For Haxton's speaker, though, the generic themes of middle age are spiked with the middle-class guilt of a protest-era child who suddenly finds that he is part of the status quo. In bygone days, the power of hallucinogenic drugs and the easy escape of the bayou were enough to bridge socioeconomic gaps, and brought together, for example, the Haxton's Eliot-quoting poet and his Dylan-singing friend. But the friend moved onto harder drugs and younger women, and Haxton, despite a false bio in which he gives up fame and fortune for the anonymity of blues composition, gave up a blue-collar life ("instead of tears I could be selling men's clothes") for that of academia. Haxton's ideal is "Craig or Greg," the museum guard who, catching him in the midst of memorizing "Lycidas," takes over the recitation from him. Haxton's speaker recognizes that this scene is pure wish-fulfillment, and his vigilant self-consciousness throughout the book lends weight to his imagined returns to the tawdry South of his youth, and foreground a battle between a tendency towards lyricism and the desire to "make part make sense." The anti-elitist ethos similar to that which drove much Greek drama seems to be what Haxton is shooting for (Haxton is a noted translator from Greek), but the necessary degree of depersonalization never quite happens.
