Goat Funeral: Poems"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." --Richard Howard |
Contents
Theme Song for an Agrarian Epic 35 | 3 |
Eclogue | 9 |
Eclogue 6 | 16 |
Copyright | |
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acacia blossoms Aegean Agni Agrarian Epic Allegheny College allow ourselves music Amanita muscaria Anamnesis Ariadne Postscript Azaleas beauty beneath Bill Matthews blasts blood Blues for Bill body chatter Christopher Bakken chuck Coleridge in Valletta Czeslaw Milosz D.H. Lawrence Dandelion Dead at 55 dead we grieve dream Duet with Czeslaw Duet with D.H. Duet with Fernando Duet with Salvatore Eclogue 7 Matia Eclogue 8 Winter Eclogue 9 El Greco eyes Fernando Pessoa Gettysburg Review Goat Funeral heaving island Kerry Neville Bakken Late Adam Thinking lyre marble Martyrdom of San Minimalist Eclogue music at least Naxos night Ohio Elegy Parenthesis Paris Review Paul Celan Pear Plusios PN Review U.K. poems Poetry Poets Portrait Detail Postcard Purgatory Salvatore Quasimodo San Mauricio shade shadow singing square stone there's things tire Titos Patrikios tongue tonight tree Violin Solo vowels wave wine wings woke Words from Elpenor World Reduced