Full Description
The poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient's fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us.
First the poet addresses "the limits of the containing air," the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.
Contents
1. Limits of the Containing Air
Coupling6
How Live, How Love?7
The Breathing Place 9
Bluely Boundless Sea11
Beethoven's Metronome12
There Are the Old Grand Things Still13
Retrieval14
Bus15
Ferns, Fingers, Gorges17
Ovid on the Lake18
Breathless19
What Was to Be an Elegy for Emily Dickinson20
Herds of Stags Among Fir Trees21
Self-Portrait as Absence of Days 22
Winds from the Wilderness24
2. The Era
Obscenity the First Language of Soldiers28
The Era30
No Leaf Will Shade 32
Sat Down and Wept by Lake and Cloud Gear33
Birds of Washington35
I Am a Circle until I Become a Power36
Supervising the Woods37
Thin Bible-Paper Skies39
3. Green Water
Los Vientos de Mi Vida42
Absalom in the Flower's Throat43
Solo Rip44
Seven of My Sweet Loves Drove off of Cliffs46
Like a Waterfall Seen from the Lip, More Felt than Seen47
Singing in Octaves with the Breakfast Robins48
The Persistence of the Particular: a Letter to the Painter
Brian Shields49
And I After So Many Words . . .50
Blessed Disorder51
Sunny Flow from Little Barks52
I Want to Walk with You in the Roaring Gardens 53
Canoeing a Worn River55
Notes60
Acknowledgments61
