feast gently

by Gc Waldrep

Overview

In his most autobiographically transparent (and most comical) collection to date, Waldrep explores the intersections between body and spirit, faith and action. These are lyrics of incarnation, of method and meat-hood, of illness and the vicissitudes of love, earthly as well as heavenly, occupying the space between desire and gratification, between pain and praise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946482112
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

G. C. Waldrep is the author of several collections of poetry, including feast gently, also published by Tupelo, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament. Waldrep’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, APR, New England Review, New American Writing, Harper’s, Tin House, Verse, and many other journals, as well as twice in The Best American Poetry and in the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. He has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.

Table of Contents

Their Facos Shall Be as Flames 3

Like a Fire from Which Sparks Emitted Do Fly Upward 6

Fox-Breath/ (para-chantry) 9

To the Embalmers 10

On Setting Myself on Fire 12

White Peaches 15

In Memory of Domestic Life 17

On the Seventh Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan 19

Chipping Campden 21

Untitled (Drone Poem) 23

Anniversary 26

Convocation (Psaltery) 31

Neither Winter nor a Golden Dust 33

Fishguard Harbour 35

Eight Short Films about Architecture 37

Candleweb, Thaw 46

Map / (after Jasper Johns) 48

Poem in Which I Pretend You Are Still Alive (I) 50

Poem in Which I Pretend You Are Still Alive (II) 53

The Prescriptivist 55

Small Song (for Edith Stein) 57

Cancer Poem 59

The Fear Was in the Northeast 61

Common Prayer 63

Passion for St. Wenog's Day 65

Watching Sparrows Dust-Bathe in a Dry Gutter 66

The Grievers 67

The Doubled Organs 68

What David Taught & Where He Taught It 70

Ascension Day 71

As Flesh Made New Through Burning 74

The Completion of Shadows 75

My Beast Made of Gold Is My Vocation 76

Metobelus 77

Acknowledgments 80

Editorial Reviews

08/13/2018
With roots in daily life, these long-lined meditations from poet and historian Waldrep (Testament) reach from the sensory to the sublime and back. Waldrep’s poems trouble the edge of knowing, and many take place at night or in shadow: “In darkness I move around my house/ as a blind man might, touching/ the walls, the furniture, small objects,/ my own body.” The collection moves much like this speaker, exploring daily spaces rendered uncanny, if not enigmatic, and aware that even the most familiar things are ontologically distinct from the speaker’s experience. Waldrep, who allows that “Sometimes touch is better/ than illumination,” revels in the space of partial knowledge. He writes poems of interiority, inviting the reader to the slow but expansive terrain of cognition. But, here, interiority is a way of reaching out to find what of the world can be grasped by the senses and arranged by careful thought. And the world reaches back: “What does the snow learn?/ The shape of the flesh, the shape of the heat of the flesh/ and its offal./ The sun is a distant body.” Waldrep’s poetry details a kind of brushing against the self, the way mystery threads through observation. (May)

Publishers Weekly