Musing / / sonnets by Jonathan Locke Hart ; with an introduction by Gordon Teskey.

• Superior document: Mingling Voices
• VerfasserIn: Hart, Jonathan Locke, 1956-
• TeilnehmendeR: Teskey, Gordon,
• Place / Publishing House: Edmonton, [Alberta] : : AU Press,, 2011.; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: Mingling voices.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (145 pages) :; digital file(s).
• Notes: Includes index.

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

Table of Contents

Cover; Copyright Page; Introduction; Musing; 1. The boughs lay withered beyond the brow; 2. What is not said in the garden; 3. The sparrow on the trough is world enough; 4. The garden in the ruined abbey brims; 5. Your face was the chalk in these hills; 6. The fen stretches out like prairie, the canals; 7. They married looking out to sea, the west; 8. All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed; 9. The winter of our breath was the blue; 10. So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me; 11. Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger

12. You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect13. The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park; 14. Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher; 15. The aspersion she cast cuts deep: the times; 16. Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul; 17. Son, you were allergic to filberts then; 18. Daughter, you are more delicate; 19. Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves; 20. The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road; 21. This harvest is the sap that moves in us; 22. The dog beyond the gate barked, as if; 23. If joy could screeve from lung and marrow

24. You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude25. The scree on the beach was lost in your breath; 26. The renitency of the will opposes all; 27. The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape; 28. The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard; 29. The windows of the moon have cast; 30. They were quartering us in these streets; 31. There was a window on the stars, the cusp; 32. Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend; 33. Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode; 34. There was jazz playing in a room away; 35. The winds rise over the plain outside Paris

36. Till we fled Calais these two terrains37. Window night-frame time of the moon; 38. I have washed too many I have watched; 39. There were stones there were knives; 40. It's not custom to begin with the couplet; 41. The angles of the moon over, through those trees; 42. The absence of your breath heats my marrow; 43. The embarrassment of words abandons us; 44. The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice; 45. Just when it seems she will sing deport; 46. Through the threshold the pollen draws, the light; 47. And yet the morning light held you, the cuts

48. When I was young the world was young: you know49. It would be as the wind, but some force; 50. This night, like the vanity of death; 51. Palm trees came to France in 1864; 52. Freezing to death is not an act of love; 53. Your arms are not a trope, and hyperbole; 54. Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way; 55. So much depends on the glibness of words; 56. I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr; 57. When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed; 58. The closer to the ground, the more fictional; 59. Silent devotion at first light, wind; 60. Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones

61. The way trains move, poetry moves