Past Imperfect: PoemsThere is the heartbreak tied to human love and there is heartbreak that points to notions of the divine. The poems in Suzanne Buffam's debut collection, Past Imperfect, enter the darkness of both -- at times simultaneously -- giving utterance to the breakage and shards of weak light found therein. Employing humour and directness to equal effect, Past Imperfect admits the self is fluid; so we wave farewell to many selves. These are poems of great intensity, driven by intelligence, tracing the barely knowable contours of a soul-in-progress. In a voice as confident, elegant, and vivid as it is brimming with doubt, Past Imperfect employs recurrent images like echoes or quiet obsessions. These become totems of absence, of presence, of the potential other, or simply, of the world as it is: breathtakingly beautiful, refusing to minister to our solitude. |
From inside the book
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... One builds a box . One buries the bird on the ridge . One locks up the cabin . One turns back the hands of a clock . One grips the railing . One drops a silver chain into the lake . One presses a small yellow bud between the chapter on 19.
... lake . Between my strokes , erratic , slack , small buffetings that gave the day , your laughter from the shore , their shape . Your skipped voice lit across the waves and gave me something vanishing to aim for , something solid to ...
... lake , preparing to wound me again with the sight of their beautiful backs . A little boy ran up and pulled my hair and ran off . For months you're a smudge on the rug , watching the wind blow , maybe taking your pulse every hour or so ...
Contents
Another Bildungsroman | 3 |
And Also the Pleiades | 9 |
Open Water | 15 |
Copyright | |
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