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Sparrow

Poems

Author Carol Muske-Dukes
Ebook (EPUB)
Random House Group | Random House
On sale Nov 12, 2008 | 80 Pages | 9780307491190
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Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the reader into a mesmerizing world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the questions that undergird all of art, all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the image of the sparrow, flitting from Catullus to the contemporary lyric.

Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of poetry and acting, the marriage of two artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be, in this profound elegiac collection, one of today’s finest living poets.
VALENTINE'S DAY, 2003
 
By the heart, the heart is shaped for use.
Sweet Valentine, think on thy Proteus.
 
Heart and shaper of the heart.
One a swift violent muscle,
the other pure impetus: digitalis
 
of metaphor setting the changing
pace. Steady waves on the hospital chart
        or a spin in Death's speedboat—
 
Consider the dangerous white wake
                  in which we surface.
Wish me partake in thy happiness
When thou dost meet good hap
 
The first plane flies into the building.
The second into the heart's history.
And in thy danger
If ever danger do environ thee
 
Your death and the world's dying
seem, to me, one. Bomb strapped on
the chest, left side. A man stepping off a lit deck
 
into singing air.
 
Commend thy grievance to my holy prayers
For I was the one you loved
 
though each act of terror took away
the perspective of measured breath.
 
For I will be thy beadsman, Valentine
Beadsman now and this beating heart—
as the speedboat turns back across its own churning wake.
Terror and love, word & gesture, our hap. This sweet awful day.
 
This valentine.
 
Ionic
 
—after Cavafy
 
That their statues are broken,
that their temples are empty
doesn't mean that they are dead, the gods.
 
The gods never die—but memory
clears itself like the sky over Ionia—
Ionia the dream that is always forgotten
at dawn. The eyes of the god, the upturned
 
eyes, take in everything, nothing escapes
that gaze—then it is all enveloped in fire,
invisible fire of waking, the shudder of
returning consciousness, the lit blades.
 
But once I caught the winged figure, indistinct,
ascending. I saw him turn back and stare at me,
not able to erase what he knew I'd seen. His eyes
implicated in the loss, sudden pathos—then disappearance
over the bright hills.
 
WAITING FOR
 
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?
You asked, because you were Vladimir
And it was your turn to speak, to cry out
Astride the grave, a difficult birth …
 
Then I was terrified of you and your
transient's heart, your hat pulled down
to your eyes, bewhiskered, old—your
gaze young, demented, blue. It occurred
 
to me that we'd never come to a crossroads.
Or we'd always come to a crossroads. The
two tramps were waiting, but we never
waited for each other. Habit is a great
 
deadener, Vladimir said, but we never
lived with habit. You sat up in bed,
you howled as I philosophized, your face alight.
Leaves fell upward. We laughed, weightless,
 
pulled down by gravity. Each day was unlike
the others. For years at a time, years at
a time, remember? Or not.
Nothing in our lives was ever usual.
 
Copyright © 2008 by Carol Muske-Dukes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • NOMINEE
    Louisiana Young Reader's Choice Award
Advance praise for Sparrow

“Marriage is a pact with an other both beloved and unknowable—and loss, therefore, means losing both what we know and what we can never circumscribe. Sparrow is a stunning elegy for the actor David Dukes, but like all great poetry, it reaches beyond the specifics of a life, or a death. In poems haunted by Lear and Godot, Catullus and Oscar Wilde, a chorus of shades, art’s animating phantoms, ghost this brooding, loving book into startling life.” —Mark Doty

“A private matter Sparrow may invoke, but it reaches to the center of so much loss—personal and public.” —Adrienne Rich

“Sparrow is an act of retrieval, a way of reviving David Dukes through memory. The lines of the poems are, in effect, life-lines, and within them he is brought back into a second life, one that will last.” —Mark Strand

“Sparrow is a powerful, compelling journey from the loss of a personal paradise to the regaining that follows. Carol Muske-Dukes shows us how grief can be stabilized by craft and sense brought to bear on anguish, one careful line of poetry at a time.” —Billy Collins

Praise for Carol Muske-Dukes

“[In Red Trousseau] Carol Muske-Dukes achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation.” —Jorie Graham

“[An Octave Above Thunder] is poetry of beauty and integrity that tells the truth of art.” —The Nation

“[Carol Muske-Dukes is] that wonderful rare thing: a poet who has the ability to deepen the secrets of experience even while revealing them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her 1997 collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A poet, critical essayist, and fiction author, she lives in Los Angeles. View titles by Carol Muske-Dukes

About

Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the reader into a mesmerizing world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the questions that undergird all of art, all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the image of the sparrow, flitting from Catullus to the contemporary lyric.

Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of poetry and acting, the marriage of two artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be, in this profound elegiac collection, one of today’s finest living poets.

Excerpt

VALENTINE'S DAY, 2003
 
By the heart, the heart is shaped for use.
Sweet Valentine, think on thy Proteus.
 
Heart and shaper of the heart.
One a swift violent muscle,
the other pure impetus: digitalis
 
of metaphor setting the changing
pace. Steady waves on the hospital chart
        or a spin in Death's speedboat—
 
Consider the dangerous white wake
                  in which we surface.
Wish me partake in thy happiness
When thou dost meet good hap
 
The first plane flies into the building.
The second into the heart's history.
And in thy danger
If ever danger do environ thee
 
Your death and the world's dying
seem, to me, one. Bomb strapped on
the chest, left side. A man stepping off a lit deck
 
into singing air.
 
Commend thy grievance to my holy prayers
For I was the one you loved
 
though each act of terror took away
the perspective of measured breath.
 
For I will be thy beadsman, Valentine
Beadsman now and this beating heart—
as the speedboat turns back across its own churning wake.
Terror and love, word & gesture, our hap. This sweet awful day.
 
This valentine.
 
Ionic
 
—after Cavafy
 
That their statues are broken,
that their temples are empty
doesn't mean that they are dead, the gods.
 
The gods never die—but memory
clears itself like the sky over Ionia—
Ionia the dream that is always forgotten
at dawn. The eyes of the god, the upturned
 
eyes, take in everything, nothing escapes
that gaze—then it is all enveloped in fire,
invisible fire of waking, the shudder of
returning consciousness, the lit blades.
 
But once I caught the winged figure, indistinct,
ascending. I saw him turn back and stare at me,
not able to erase what he knew I'd seen. His eyes
implicated in the loss, sudden pathos—then disappearance
over the bright hills.
 
WAITING FOR
 
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?
You asked, because you were Vladimir
And it was your turn to speak, to cry out
Astride the grave, a difficult birth …
 
Then I was terrified of you and your
transient's heart, your hat pulled down
to your eyes, bewhiskered, old—your
gaze young, demented, blue. It occurred
 
to me that we'd never come to a crossroads.
Or we'd always come to a crossroads. The
two tramps were waiting, but we never
waited for each other. Habit is a great
 
deadener, Vladimir said, but we never
lived with habit. You sat up in bed,
you howled as I philosophized, your face alight.
Leaves fell upward. We laughed, weightless,
 
pulled down by gravity. Each day was unlike
the others. For years at a time, years at
a time, remember? Or not.
Nothing in our lives was ever usual.
 
Copyright © 2008 by Carol Muske-Dukes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • NOMINEE
    Louisiana Young Reader's Choice Award

Reviews

Advance praise for Sparrow

“Marriage is a pact with an other both beloved and unknowable—and loss, therefore, means losing both what we know and what we can never circumscribe. Sparrow is a stunning elegy for the actor David Dukes, but like all great poetry, it reaches beyond the specifics of a life, or a death. In poems haunted by Lear and Godot, Catullus and Oscar Wilde, a chorus of shades, art’s animating phantoms, ghost this brooding, loving book into startling life.” —Mark Doty

“A private matter Sparrow may invoke, but it reaches to the center of so much loss—personal and public.” —Adrienne Rich

“Sparrow is an act of retrieval, a way of reviving David Dukes through memory. The lines of the poems are, in effect, life-lines, and within them he is brought back into a second life, one that will last.” —Mark Strand

“Sparrow is a powerful, compelling journey from the loss of a personal paradise to the regaining that follows. Carol Muske-Dukes shows us how grief can be stabilized by craft and sense brought to bear on anguish, one careful line of poetry at a time.” —Billy Collins

Praise for Carol Muske-Dukes

“[In Red Trousseau] Carol Muske-Dukes achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation.” —Jorie Graham

“[An Octave Above Thunder] is poetry of beauty and integrity that tells the truth of art.” —The Nation

“[Carol Muske-Dukes is] that wonderful rare thing: a poet who has the ability to deepen the secrets of experience even while revealing them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author

Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her 1997 collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A poet, critical essayist, and fiction author, she lives in Los Angeles. View titles by Carol Muske-Dukes

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