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They Lift Their Wings to Cry

Author Brooks Haxton
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Knopf
On sale Sep 25, 2013 | 96 Pages | 9780307804341
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Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings.

In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says:
Whorls of a magnetic field
exfoliated under the solar wind,
so that the northern lights above me
trembled. No: that was the porch light
blurred by tears.

With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love.

A master of moods—as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers—Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page.

ISAAC’S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M.

From the dark tree at his window
blossoms battered by the rain
fell into the summer grass, white
horns, all spattered down the throat
with purple ink, while unseen birds,
with creaks and peeps
and whistles, started
the machinery of daybreak.
MY FATHER'S SUITThe suit we chose was navy blue.He sold them, hundreds,which we helped to fit,our hands impersonal,adept, that signed the papers now,while someone dressed his bodyin the suit. Without cosmetics,in the viewing room, the facelooked green and uninhabited,lips wide and thickly set,no ghost of him, not sad,not funny, not one bitafraid-the freckle on the hand,hair, veins, what had been his,without him now, extraneous, inane,brow under my trembling right palmcool with an inhuman density,as though immovable, but not.SUNLIGHT AFTER WARM RAINBrow damped by the noonday,drops at the edge of his jawin coruscations, he stood stillin the shade of that same oakhe had climbed in another lifefor mistletoe his mother usedto liven their front door at solstice,that same oak where his fathernow lay under the drip line.GIFTAll our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;and we all do fade as a leaf-Isaiah 64:6After my mother's father died,she gave me his morocco Bible.I took it from her hand, and sawthe gold was worn away, the bindingscuffed and ragged, split below the spine,and inside, smudges where her father'sright hand gripped the bottom cornerpage by page, an old man waiting, not quitereading the words he had known by heartfor sixty years: our parents in the garden,naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;blood in the ground, still calling for God'scurse-his thumbprints fading after the flood,to darken again where God bids Moses smitethe rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthewevery page. And where Paul speaks of thingsGod hath prepared, things promised them who wait,things not yet entered into the loving heart,below the margin of the verse, the paperis translucent with the oil and darkstill with the dirt of his right hand.
Copyright © 2008 by Brooks Haxton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© George Tatge
BROOKS HAXTON has published eight books of poetry, a nonfiction account of his son's career in high-stakes poker, and translations from Greek, French, and German. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He wrote the script for a film on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, broadcast in the American Masters series. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, Haxton has taught for many years in the graduate creative writing programs of Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College. View titles by Brooks Haxton

About

Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings.

In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says:
Whorls of a magnetic field
exfoliated under the solar wind,
so that the northern lights above me
trembled. No: that was the porch light
blurred by tears.

With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love.

A master of moods—as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers—Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page.

ISAAC’S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M.

From the dark tree at his window
blossoms battered by the rain
fell into the summer grass, white
horns, all spattered down the throat
with purple ink, while unseen birds,
with creaks and peeps
and whistles, started
the machinery of daybreak.

Excerpt

MY FATHER'S SUITThe suit we chose was navy blue.He sold them, hundreds,which we helped to fit,our hands impersonal,adept, that signed the papers now,while someone dressed his bodyin the suit. Without cosmetics,in the viewing room, the facelooked green and uninhabited,lips wide and thickly set,no ghost of him, not sad,not funny, not one bitafraid-the freckle on the hand,hair, veins, what had been his,without him now, extraneous, inane,brow under my trembling right palmcool with an inhuman density,as though immovable, but not.SUNLIGHT AFTER WARM RAINBrow damped by the noonday,drops at the edge of his jawin coruscations, he stood stillin the shade of that same oakhe had climbed in another lifefor mistletoe his mother usedto liven their front door at solstice,that same oak where his fathernow lay under the drip line.GIFTAll our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;and we all do fade as a leaf-Isaiah 64:6After my mother's father died,she gave me his morocco Bible.I took it from her hand, and sawthe gold was worn away, the bindingscuffed and ragged, split below the spine,and inside, smudges where her father'sright hand gripped the bottom cornerpage by page, an old man waiting, not quitereading the words he had known by heartfor sixty years: our parents in the garden,naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;blood in the ground, still calling for God'scurse-his thumbprints fading after the flood,to darken again where God bids Moses smitethe rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthewevery page. And where Paul speaks of thingsGod hath prepared, things promised them who wait,things not yet entered into the loving heart,below the margin of the verse, the paperis translucent with the oil and darkstill with the dirt of his right hand.
Copyright © 2008 by Brooks Haxton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© George Tatge
BROOKS HAXTON has published eight books of poetry, a nonfiction account of his son's career in high-stakes poker, and translations from Greek, French, and German. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He wrote the script for a film on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, broadcast in the American Masters series. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, Haxton has taught for many years in the graduate creative writing programs of Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College. View titles by Brooks Haxton

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