Spell

Description

A new collection of provocative work from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry

Ann Lauterbach is one of America’s most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of “spell”: her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life’s difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of “Conversations with Evening,” Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor.Praise for Ann Lauterbach’s most recent collection, Under the Sign:

“For almost four decades, Lauterbach has kept asking, in poem after allusive poem, how wisdom arrives, how senses make sense, how art matters and happens—and what love, and loss, have to do with it . . . her poems ‘make nothing happen,’ except a way to think hard—and to hold out hope for thought to occur.” —Boston Review

“As a poet, Lauterbach is nothing if not versatile in content and form. . . . Her register is resolutely multivalent. . . . She challenges and enchants.” —The Rumpus

“Enacting insight, intuition, elegance, and humor, these poems are, in a phrase coined by fellow individualist Frederick Seidel, ‘daggers that sing.’” —Rain TaxiAnn Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. She has been since 1992 co-chair of writ-ing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where she is also Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature. Among the recognitions of her work are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1986) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993). She is the author of nine previous collections of poetry, as well as three collec-tions of prose, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. She lives in German-town, New York.PAUSE

The arc of distance is partial.
A continuum belated us, like the slow-​­motion
spit of a shaman. Friendships went south. We could not
name our freedoms, only the pause between days
in which all matters of belonging
densely accrued, then
scattered. I could not wake up. She wore
a tiara and spoke rapidly
into the swollen air,
youthful and eager, in bliss for that, while I
changed into a shadow just as the oil,
heating in the kitchen, began to snarl
and a single mosquito
itched against the screen, wanting
out, or blood. The arc of distance is partial.
The sun set into its given, not prone to regret or sorrow.

I’ll stay in the thick jungle’s weeds, without
expertise, and mystify the brand. A quotidian
logic animates the scene, heads
nodding, hands
busy under cover of night. I’ll stay
here by the leaves yellowing in their
dotage, among sentences
dangling on webs and irreducible
to the temptation to flee. I’ll
be here in the ancient shade of a crass
belligerent god, huge on a high wire,
teetering over an abyss. I’m here, sweetheart,
dressed in my skin, ready

There is some kindness in the zone of farewell: handing
over the towel, removing the shoes, looking away
from the hanging figure’s heavy pain,
sending a note: Beloved, I regret
you were not able to continue on this path
we made together, but did not follow,
and that your mouth fit so easily over its lies
like a kiss. No matter. We are
severed from the memorial’s agenda,
which has, as you know,
moved on without us. The light is blue-​­gray
and the evidence of harm has been removed,
swept under the great litter they call what happened.US