Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare

by Lola Haskins

Overview

Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822986744
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	87
File size:	762 KB

About the Author

Lola Haskins is the author of twelve books of poetry and three of prose. Among her honors are the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, several awards for narrative poetry, and the Emily Dickinson Prize from Poetry Society of America. She currently serves as Honorary Chancellor of the Florida State Poets Association. She divides her time between Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, North Yorkshire.

Read an Excerpt

Constellated
 
 
When the atoms in my body
 
return to stars
 
They will not remember
 
this five am
 
out my window,
 
neither the moor
 
asleep on the horizon,
 
nor, across her darkened hips,
 
the scatters
 
of bright yellow gorse.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Author's Note One Mortality Halfway Down the Block, Your Father Bravery Toasts It Of Dust on a White Counter Elegy for Woolah Marie On the Way to the Paper Shop Down the Hall, a Bell Serenade When You Live under the Mountain The Old Poet Two The Interpreters In Tide Pools In the Stark Lands Two for Django Three Poems Written in Pencil on Hotel Notepaper Thirteen Music Boxes Reflections Lotuses The Oklawaha Is a Braided River Oklawaha, Divided Three Useless A Warm Day Furnitures in a Room Variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" or Something Like That The Art Critic Tours the Exhibit Three Prominent People The Fruit Detective Robert and Christopher up in a Tree Ste. Françoise des Croissants The Love Song of Frances Jane Some Reflections on Theatre Mistakes Message Received in the Engine Room Four Altar The Wig-Dusting Hole An Incident Involving Timothy Crowther, Town Clerk of Skipton, 1761 Below High Bradley Destiny Dead Stars Bracken The Gamekeeper The Benchmark The Night after the Total Eclipse Across the Tops The Hedgehog The Swan The Masons Constellated The End of Our Lives Is at Hand! Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Lola Haskins writes with the startling freedom and grace of a kite flying and with the variety and assurance of invention that reveal, in image after image, the dream of the waking world.” —W.S. Merwin
 


“Ms. Haskins has the wide-eyed power to be tender, vulnerable, and exact. She noses through her amazing world like a baby tortoise, feeling her contours with delicate feet and finding everything weird, and still marvelous.” —George Macbeth
 


“Insightful and beautifully written, Lola Haskins' poetry is as beguiling as the Florida creeks, tupelo trees, and wading birds that grace its pages. Trusting equally in pen and paddle, Haskins perfectly invokes the blink of rain on a lake's surface, the moment when a river's color shifts from clear to amber. In Lola Haskins, water has its own Poet Laureate.” —Cynthia Barnett
 

“Haskins’ work here is spare, honed to a sharp and flinty precision. She travels deep into Clare’s mind and spirit to reveal profound and deeply moving illuminations about his—and her own—spiritual core.” —South Florida Poetry Review

“Anchored by Clare’s text, the poems in Asylum range widely— geographically, emotionally, and technically—and this large-hearted flexibility and suppleness is one of the book’s many gifts.” —Salamander
 

From the Publisher