Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems(Salt Modern Poets)

"Stanzas on Mount Elbert" Where we climbed in the berserk air Of trails, sharp spiky views And dizzying vertigo. I watched Marmot and pika dart Among lichen covered rocks Envying not their agility But that they survive On such apparent bleakness. Then, seeing you on the path above, Aspen crook in hand, orange poncho Bannered to the wind, the painter's Famous "Wanderer in the Clouds", Whatever passes between us, Whoever you are, in that moment You were a guide to me. We took The path six inches at a time: with each Breath a step; with each step a breath, Sounds of ourselves reverberating In hollows, in great brown cratered cups of rock Until what was human seemed to be passing Into its sheer facticity. And by the summit, head abuzz in thin air, Pain or joy or confusion heaped as one Into the round bulge Of the mountain's endlessness, it was Almost too comical to have walked there, To worship at that feast of obstacles. And the lakes four thousand feet below Leered crazily. I think We were looking back At what does or does not exist, What the mind mirrors; something To which we do not so much return As turn to, though the turning hurts.

Table of Contents:
from Accidental Center In the Difficulties Pressure: Maro Spring Paragraphs The Body: A Fable The Autumn of Apollinaire Incontinence from Knowledge Knowledge Florida Letter Question and Answer before Threnody Bialystok Stanzas After Montale The Mind’s Return Postulates Stanzas om Mount Elbert Near Guernsey, Wyoming On the Beach from In the Builded Place Father Parmenides Moon Study Coral Stanzas The Bright Light at the Point The Acoustics of Emptiness Well-Dressing Rounds Mythos of Logos After Plato Homer Timeless In Central Park Jury Duty in Manhattan Adulation Strophes from the Writings of Walter Benjamin For Paul Blackburn In the School Outside a Classroom in Nerja Tourist’s Cave Statue: Jardin du Luxembourg Climb to an Ancient Chateau in France Fifty-Three Rue Notra Dame de Nazareth Accidental Meeting with an Israeli Poet Palestine In a Dark Time, On his Grandfather For Uncle Nat Constellations of Waking Two Swans in a Meadow by the Sea A Night for Chinese Poets January Nights Late Visit Being at East Hampton This Many Colored Brush Which Once forced the Elements Water, Heads, Hamptons Partitions Miami Waters Father Studies In Elegiacs, Birds of Florida from Wordflow Lecture with Celan Leaving the Museum Stanzas at Maresfield Gardens Without Ozymandias At the Muse’s Tomb In Paris Prony’s Calculations Thinking of Mary Partents’ Grave One Day, What you Said to Yourself She To Postmodernity Classical Theme Sag Harbor, Whitman, as if an Ode New Poems Cyclical “We cano only wish valeat quantum valere potest.” Autobiographia Winter Notes, East End

About the Author :
Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are Conviction’s Net of Branches, In The Builded Place, Wordflow and Living Root: A Memoir. He wrote the libretto for the recently performed opera, Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin. His awards include the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, the Di Castagnola Prize and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. He was born in 1937 in New York City where he now lives.

Review :
There is a classic largeness to these poems, whether of means or of reference – a consummately civilized response to our times that makes the intimate and the physical still primary despite the generalized chaos Heller movingly confronts. … tone perfect poems – the tone, the scale, note by note, interval by interval – attack on the `gods of ennui and loneliness.’ Michael Heller’s poetry is the song of metaphysical narrative.… The generous and powerful energies in these poems track the potential transformations inhering in `flimsy beatitudes of order,’ whose possibilities haunt and illuminate the entire book. The formal and thematic tension here creates a nearly elegiac tone.… Abstract ideas are juxtaposed with imagery of earth and sea, and nature becomes a symbol of human drama – passionate, unbridled.