Musing

by Jonathan Locke Hart

Overview

Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart's poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: "These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926836386
Publisher:	Athabasca University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Series:	Mingling Voices
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	145
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems have been published in Estonian, French, and Greek. His recent books include Dream China, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.
Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems have been published in Estonian, French, and Greek. He teaches at the University of Alberta, and his recent books include Dream China, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.

Table of Contents

Index of First Lines A certain happiness exists despite 86 A Romanesque bridge joins one hill 65 All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed 8 And yet the morning light held you, the cuts 47 Another poet scoffed when I said 72 Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher 14 Daughter, you are more delicate 18 Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed 66 Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way 54 For him, there is only one poet: his wife 93 Freezing to death is not an act of love 52 Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77 Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode 33 How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108 I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr 56 I have a whole cache I will one day 62 I have washed too many I have watched 38 If joy could screeve from lung and marrow 23 Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16 In your eyes along the streets can I see 64 It is not as if the sun and I 90 It would be as the wind, but some force 49 It’s not custom to begin with the couplet 40 Just when it seems she will sing deport 45 Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend 32 Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some 100 Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out 74 My heart is even lonelier than my face 80 Nostalgia and utopia, past and future 68 On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk 76 On the brink of simile I faced 98 Our whatever is an asymptote and not 89 Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France 88 Palm trees came to France in 1864 51 Remember our mothers who bore us 83 Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones 87 Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds 82 Silent devotion at first light, wind 59 So much depends on the glibness of words, 55 So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me 10 Something rebarbative lives in this life 94 Son, you were allergic to filberts then 17 Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger 11 The absence of your breath heats my marrow 42 The angles of the moon over, through those trees 41 The aspersion she cast cuts deep: the times 15 The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died 109 The boughs lay withered beyond the brow 1 The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71 The closer to the ground, the more fictional 58 The clouds lie over the land near Avignon 70 The country is not pastoral: it was 67 The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park 13 The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79 The dog beyond the gate barked, as if 22 The embarrassment of words abandons us 43 The fen stretches out like prairie, the canals 6 The garden in the ruined abbey brims 4 The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant 102 The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice 44 The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape 101 The nuclear power plants smoke over the land 69 The renitency of the will opposes all 26 The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25 The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape 27 The season of our wooing, a stillness now 84 The shadows of the evening still across 92 The sparrow on the trough is world enough 3 The speculation of music has 103 The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road 20 The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard 28 The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75 The way trains move, poetry moves 61 The white cliffs above Cassis 91 The wind was slapping the water, and the surf 105 The winds rise over the plain outside Paris 35 The windows of the moon have cast 29 The winter of our breath was the blue 9 There was a window on the stars, the cusp 31 There was jazz playing in a room away 34 There were stones there were knives 39 There’s something about a train that is like 97 These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age 95 They married looking out to sea, the west 7 They were quartering us in these streets 30 This harvest is the sap that moves in us 21 This night, like the vanity of death 50 Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones 60 Through the threshold the pollen draws, the light 46 Till we fled Calais these two terrains 36 Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves 19 We rose from dust on a day not of our 104 What is not said in the garden 2 What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106 When I was young the world was young: you know 48 When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed 57 Who would hear me above the surf, the remains 78 Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun 73 Window night-frame time of the moon 37 Winter has its verges, not a green snow 81 World, breath, disinherited us, even 85 You don’t have to be Richard the Third 107 You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect 12 You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24 You see before you a man more ridiculous 63 You watch the dying light after the star 96 Your arms are not a trope, and hyperbole 53 Your face was the chalk in these hills 5 Your heart is knapped flint, or is it mine? 99