Night Mowing

by Chard deNiord

Overview

The poems in Night Mowing find their influence in the natural and the erotic; the biblical and the classical; the aesthetic and the spiritual. The landscape exists as both an ecstatic source of inspiration and as an endangered garden, and the narrator of these poems moves through that landscape in admiration and anguish: trying to preserve his joyful innocence while fully aware of the transience of all that he sees. Each poem in its specifics, whether focusing on a lover, a mountain, a dog, or a critic, wrestles with the universal and sacred, revealing the instinct of the poems to move toward purity and deep feeling even in dark times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990802
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/25/2005
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	443 KB

About the Author

Chard deNiord is cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire, Sharp Golden Thorn, Night Mowing, The Double Truth, and Interstate. His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs is a collection of interviews with American poets. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets.

Table of Contents

Contents I. Raiding the Bees Raiding the Bees To Hear and Hear Frog Sugaring The Metaphysics of Husbandry Whales The Birds Kitty Yellow Jackets Shaman A Day in the Life Catch Field Work Sighting December 10 The Sting Cave Text The Overstory From the Beginning On The Fox II. Sleeping Lessons Sleeping Lessons III. Time Was Dusk Night Mowing Hammock The First Margaret Miller’s Arm The Field The Pain That Is So Great Anniversary July 30 Bourbon Street Through a Train Window Gatsby Presents His Case to the Sport of Heaven Dinner with Charlie I Get Up When I’m Dead First Touch From the Curriculum of a Guilty Man An Incident at the Catholic Worker Inside the Fire The Din of Ringers Houses Time Was The Dolphin Alibi The Present The Thin Time The Last Judgment The Crippling Field Harold Bloom I Stand Beneath the Mountain with an Illiterate Heart In the Eternity That Was a Day Our Eyes Are Sweet, Obedient Dogs Tree of Wisdom I See Them Now Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Robert McDowell

DeNiord bears witness to a natural world too readily overlooked in our time. Graceful, evocative, and true, [he] writes poems like one overturning stones and still capable of communicating wonder and delight in each discovery. His world, in which 'sweetness emanates as a bonus of beauty,' is memorable and compelling.

Hayden Carruth

Here is a poet with a truly extraordinary verbal imagination. His poems begin in the commonplace and rise-or soar, leap, swell-to the climactic surreal in a few lines. This is aptitude beyond technique, unassailable by the workshopping greenhorns. It is indeed a kind of ecstasy for every and any reader. I recommend Chard deNiord's new book as enthusiastically as I can.

Ira Sadoff

In narrative drive and metrical control, you'll hear an echo of Frost in Chard deNiord's new collection, which is as it should be for a New Englander who works the land and for whom memory is a source of conflict and comfort. There's real tonal range here: from humor to high seriousness: but for originality and charge of metaphor, take a look at the beekeeper poems, just the right antidote for Plath's bee poems.

Julia Kasdorf

At times narrative, at times pure song, these lyrics take the bucolic for their territory and trace the regular rhythms of season, day, the human pulse, and life span. Spiritual and primal worlds meet in a space best described by William Empson's late definition of the pastoral, wherein the complex finds expression in the simple and rustic. 'Earth is the right place for love.' Yes, and these poems are beautiful, essential reminders of that truth; boldly they speak to our broken times.

Andrew Hudgins

In Night Mowing, deNiord seeks to live totally in the moment but with an abiding sense of the eternal, like the bird in his beautiful lyric 'To Hear and Hear,' which sings 'the same sweet song / again and again in the understory.' The result is terrific poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Here is a poet with a truly extraordinary verbal imagination. His poems begin in the commonplace and rise-or soar, leap, swell-to the climactic surreal in a few lines. This is aptitude beyond technique, unassailable by the workshopping greenhorns. It is indeed a kind of ecstasy for every and any reader. I recommend Chard deNiord's new book as enthusiastically as I can.”
—Hayden Carruth

“Chard deNiord sees daily life in terms of eternity and interprets it in a modern rendition of the language of the Biblical psalmist, the language of intelligent and controlled ecstasy. In Night Mowing, deNiord seeks to live totally in the moment but with an abiding sense of the eternal, like the bird in his beautiful lyric 'To Hear and Hear,' which sings 'the same sweet song / again and again in the understory'.  The result is terrific poetry.”
—Andrew Hudgins


“At times narrative, at times pure song, these lyrics take the bucolic for their territory and trace the regular rhythms of season, day, the human pulse, and life span. Spiritual and primal worlds meet in a space best described by William Empson's late definition of the pastoral, wherein the complex finds expression in the simple and rustic. 'Earth is the right place for love.' Yes, and these poems are beautiful, essential reminders of that truth; boldly they speak to our broken times.”
—Julia Kasdorf

From the Publisher