Romey's Order (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Riley, Atsuro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226719448 ISBN 13: 9780226719443

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.

As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to “bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His honors include the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by Poetry magazine. 

 

His poems have been anthologized in The Open Door: 100 Poems--100 Years of Poetry Magazine, The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall, The Oxford Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Poems of the American South, The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets, Poems from Far and Wide, Vinegar and Char, and Gracious. 

 

Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco.

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Romey's Order

By ATSURO RILEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-71944-3

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................xiFlint-Chant.........................3Picture.............................7Turn................................9Strand..............................11Object..............................15Skin................................17Map.................................19Drift-Raft..........................20Tablet..............................21Box.................................23Nullaby.............................24Story...............................25Drill...............................26Diorama.............................28Filmstrip...........................30Rage-Lodge..........................32Skillet.............................33Campground..........................34Scroll..............................36Bell................................40Fosterling-Song.....................41Hutch...............................42Roses...............................44Clary...............................45O...................................47Chord...............................49Notes...............................53

Chapter One

FLINT-CHANT

Once upon a time a ditchpipe got left behind behind Azalea Industrial, back in the woods backing on to the Ashley, where old pitch-pines and loblollies grow wild. A mild pesticide-mist was falling and mingling with paper-mill smell and creosote oil the morning he found it. The boy shook and sheltered in its mouth awhile —hoo-hoo! hey-O!— and bent and went on in. It was like a cave but clean. He C-curved his spine against one wall to fit, and humming something, sucked his shirttail. He tuned his eyes to what low light there was and knuckle-drummed a line along his legs.

What the boy called inside-oku called him back. He was hooked right quick on the well-bottom peace of the pumicey concrete and how sounds sounded in there, and re-sounded. Tight-curled as he had to get —like a cling-shrimp one day, a pill-bug, a bass-clef, a bison's eye; an abalone (ocean-ear!), antler-arc, Ark-ant, apostrophe another— sure as clocks a cool clear under-creek would rise, and rinse him through, and runnel free. Hanging in a green-pine O outside were sun-heat and smaze and BB-fire and Mosquito Abatement. Inside there were water-limber words (and a picture-noisy nave), shades of shade.

PICTURE

This is the house (and jungle-strangled yard) I come from and carry.

The air out here is supper-singed (and bruise-tingeing) and close. From where I'm hid (a perfect Y-crotch perch of medicine-smelling sweet-gum), I can belly-worry this (welted) branch and watch for swells (and coming squalls) along our elbow-curve of river, or I can hunker-turn and brace my trunk and limbs —and face my home.

Our roof is crimp-ribbed (and buckling) tin, and tar.

Our (in-warped) wooden porch-door is kick-scarred and splintering. The hinges of it rust-cry and -rasp in time with every Tailspin-wind, and jamb-slap (and after-slap), and shudder.

Our steps are slabs of cinder-crush and -temper, tamped and cooled.

See that funnel-blur of color in the red-gold glass? —Mama, mainly: boiling jelly. She's the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there, and stove-coil coral; the quick silver blade-flash, plus the (magma-brimming) ladle-splash; that's her behind the bramble-berry purple, sieved and stored.

Out here, crickets are cricking their legs. Turtlets are cringing in their bunker-shells and burrows. Once-bedded nightcrawling worms are nerving up through beanvine-roots (and moonvines), —and dew-shining now, and cursive:

Mama will pressure-cook and scald and pan-scorch and frizzle.

Daddy will river-drift down to the (falling-down) dock.

I myself will monkey-shinny so high no bark-burns (or tree-rats, or tides) or lava-spit can reach me.

I will hunt for after-scraps (and -sparks) and eat them all.

TURN

A bright-hot morning; me and Daddy; a fever-cloud of glassy-eyed iridescent flies. Up ahead, invisible heat-devils waver over our (brownbottle) boomerang of river; our rank-pink curves of bait-bucket chicken-neck marinate, and jellify, and stew.

We are walking the oyster-shell zig-path from my blood-home to the water, three hundred and eleven crunch-steps from back door to dock. This is Daddy's day off, our day for blue-crabbing. That neon hum you're hearing? —The colored jinks of flies.

They're all here today, every local-grown species, every flying insect with a taste for something spoiled: heavy-hipped houseflies and hairy-chested horseflies, bloated bluebottles, glossy greenbottles, dirtspeck-tiny screen-huggers too high-strung to swat. One minute back, they were hovering hairnet- (and halo-) style above my bald-headed daddy; now they are down-diving, and landing, in dark clots and clusters, on his eyebrows, neck-bones, knees.

Ninety-nine.

Along in here, our switchback crumbles down to shell-shards and powder.

One hundred.

His breath comes out vinegary when he turns.

Now he's the stagger-leggèd man, sun-squinting facing me so his eyes draw tight and Japanese like Mama's. He is fishing through the fly-fog for my name.

Romey-boy ... he tries saying, slow-slurring it long, long, until the word-sound goes strange in the air and bends back on itself, like a shell-road or a river.

Ninety-nine.

Ninety-eight.

Ninety-seven.

The sand-bar has shown up (and shone) and I'm home-headed; that's my crab-net, and my lunch-bag, and my yellow fly-blown bucket, dragging there behind me like a ruined foot.

STRAND

Alphabet, sluice the porch.

Bind (and try to braid) our river-wrack and leavings.

Used to, it was cackle-berries and cat-heads with him when he dry-docked home.

Daddy: Mama, don't cook all the running out them yellows!

Me: And raise them biscuits big, for sopping!

Other egg-names of ours I've kept are hen-drops, and coop-mines (and -moons), and chicken-lights, and dumpties.

Here is the fillingstation-shirt he got from when he pump-monkeyed for money. The name-eggs (red-stitched and patched to where his chest would go) say Eugene on one side and Esso on the other. Happy Motoring! is tiger-tailed in script across its back.

Gas-smell's the main meat. Grass-sweat. Gnat lotion, neckwise. Ghost-whiffs of GOOP for gunky hands.

His hands (and mine, hammering) made this hutch. I reckon your rabbit could use her a cabin or someplace. Chicken-wire's right airy, and cleans. Let's drive some stilt-legs down to set her up, so dogs don't help theirself to supper.

(Instinct —they can't hardly help it— makes them try.)

Jim Beam & Jim Crow drive him through, like Jesus does some others.

Sure I'm evergreen for Wallace but I'm not no KKK.

Leaf. Leave. Leaves. Leaving. Left.

Have I said yet how mudworms (and flickery mind-minnows) live off leaf-chaff and blown bark-slough and home-grounds and gravel? Son, rearing you some is easy: they durn nearabout feed theirselves!

Time was —or truer, nights were— he'd porch-beach finally, or suddenly yard-founder, from nowhere.

One time I kerosened an ancient oak to lure him home.

POLAROID

The charcoal-stump of it.

The hole.

The rain-pond, ringed with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226719448
• ISBN 13: 9780226719443
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 66
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland