Chains & Mirrors
by Alex Grant
North Carolina Writers' Network/Harperprints, 2006
Winner, 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize
Winner, 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (best book by a North Carolina poet.)
ISBN: 1-883314-19-4
Poetry, 25 pages, 6.95
Author bio / Comments / Samples / Review / You Tube Reading
THE STEPS OF MONTMARTRE
after Brassai's 1936 photograph
On the steps of Sacre Coeur
Cathedral, in that same winter
when junge leute filled Bavarianbeer-gardens, ten years before
Adorno proclaimed that there
could be no art after Auschwitz,Brassai captured his flawless
image. Through the tunnel
formed by the parting trees,battalions of lamp-posts advance
and retreat in the morning mizzle,
clamp chain-link handrails hard
into sunwashed cobbles. In less
than a year, the corpseless heads
on Nanking's walls will coalescewith Guernica's ruined heart, mal
du siècle will become Weltschmerz,
and the irresistible symmetryof a million clacking bootheels
will deafen half a continent.
The red brush never dries --adagio leads finally to fugue,
haiku to satori, and the image
fixed in silver to remembering.
HOW THE CUCKOO SINGS
How like the cuckoo,
singing on the mountain-top --
Spring's last moon setting.
After singing eight thousand and eight
songs, the mountain cuckoo, the Haiku
Masters said, vomits blood and dies.Then, all things contained life: the stone,
the cup, the pitchfork -- the scent of life --
carried on the spinning of every atom.The bridge spanning the worlds of satori
and the everyday was made visible to men
by "the selfless, diligent practice of Haiku."The body knows before the mind, feels
enlightenment's temporary flash,
approaching Kundalini's electric arc.The sake cup and the overturned bowl,
swept away in the morning dust, hold
nothing less and more than life itself -eight thousand and eight songs.
NERUDA'S SUICIDE NOTE
-- In memory of Spalding Gray
They say nothing ever changes
but your point of view.
Nothing -- "some thing
that has no existence" --
this makes no sense.
I sit in the catacumbas
and listen to the rain
pound the papaya leaves --
my skin like confetti,
my heart a cheap lottery.I have seen the tiger's stripes --
they live between
the fine linen sheets
of an office-girl's bed,
in the afternoon fumblings
of someone who is no-one,
with a heart bursting
like a red balloon
on a tap -- the pieces fly
in all directions, you cover
your face with your hand,
and it sticks to your skin
like confetti, like phosphorus
launched from a Greek warship,
like the skin of a plum
peeled by a broken nail.
Alex Grant is a native Scot now living in N.C. He was the 2004 winner of WMSU's Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, the 2006 winner of the Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, and has been finalist or runner-up for Tupelo Press's Dorset Prize, The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Prizes, Discovery/The Nation, Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, The Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize and The Writers at Work Fellowship, among others. His ms., Fear of Moving Water was 1 of 6 finalists for the Hillhead House's 2006 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook contest, and he has twice been a nominated finalist for Meridian's Best New Poets anthology. His work has recently appeared or is upcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Eleventh Muse, Sycamore Review and Poetry Southeast, among others. He works up and down the eastern seaboard for a not-for-profit healthcare organization, whose address you can read by the moon, and divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he lives with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess.
Chains & Mirrors is a powerful and stunningly imaginative book that announces a hell of a good new poet!
-- Thomas Lux
I am a great admirer of Alex Grant's poems for their keen, intimate seeing and inventive juxtapositions ( A wedge of salted cantaloupe / sinking in blue agave) and for their astonishing metaphors (Grief is a silk neckerchief covering a burn / around the throat, holding sound /down in the body). Intellect and imagination are sophisticated twins in these perceptive, witty, moving poems.
-- Susan Ludvigson.
One of my greatest beliefs is that there is still mystery in this world, and that poetry - its vowels and syllables, its images -- can embody our world's enduring mysteries, if not(heaven forbid!) explain them. Alex Grant's poetry confirms my belief. These are poems for our time that, like our most cherished mysteries, will endure beyond our time.
-- Martin Lammon, editor, Arts & Letters