Errant E-Book

Gabriel Levin

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Errant, Gabriel Levin's sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book's day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. 'What Drew Me On' is inspired by Tamara Rikman's free-floating works on paper and by Plato's image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly pres¬ences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet's take on image-making down the ages. 'First came sooty beings shinnying up walls.'There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa'adi's Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

Leseprobe

GABRIEL LEVIN

Errant

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgements to the follow journals in which some of the poems were originally published: PN Review, Raritan and Stand.

The epigraph is taken from Giordano Bruno, On The Heroic Frenzies, a translation of De gli eroici furori by Ingrid D. Rowland, text edited by Eugenio Canone, the Da Ponte Italian Library, published in collaboration with the UCLA Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London, 2013, p.205.

Contents

Title PageEpigraphAcknowledgements  At the fourth watch extendObsidian Alba I Reading Nasir-i Khusraw Atropos The Shoulder of Hinnom Alba II Hellas After Avraham Ibn Ezra What Drew Me On Snow in C Sharp Minor Someone Knocks at the Door And Cush ‘To Each His Chimera’ After Simonides Death of a Cinéaste I P*aR*D*eS* Death of a Cinéaste II Outtakes for Ritsos Alba III ‘As Light Makes Both Itself And Darkness Plain’ Follow at a clipped pace the dry  Notes About the AuthorBy the same Author Copyright

Cicada: Let us go, and as we walk discover whether or not we can unravel this riddle.

Tansillo: Very well.

Giordano Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies

At the fourth watch extend

At the fourth watch extend

    your blank errancy

your slip away rills of light, oh my cilia

    bright dawn, my cloven

hoofed, tawny Aurora

rising from your flushed bed

    of noughts, O my new-

born fleeting doe, my occluded, errant

    one, spun tremulous

on your spindly axis