Synopses & Reviews
Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent--a lost leader, a remote love, a protégé not yet born--and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. "Videos of Fish," the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet's late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysical philosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. "How difficult it is to remain one person," the poet claims, echoing Czeslaw Milosz; in its progress between persons, the collection's regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet, the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and miniature.
THE READER
Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field.
Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, like an oar, its surface turned to the light.
Blacken now and lift your news into the air.
Review
"A hard won, fully realized, wonderfully eccentric book. Rather than the anxiety of influence, Peter Streckfus vows for a complex, loving embrace of influence. Written at the intersection of the words of father and son, through the echoing world of the father's unpublished novel, Errings is an adventure--full of transport--in dream and in time. This is lovingly tender and smart work."--Hank Lazer
"In his two collections, Peter Streckfus has made a lyric poetry of the highest order: spacious, luminous, contemplative, filled with strange voyages and miniature epics--he is a seer, a visionary, and yet how effortless this work seems; at its center, a stillness as ardent and searching as anything within memory."--American Academy of Arts and Letters citation for the Rome Prize in Literature
"Peter Streckfus's great subject is the discovery, repeated second by second, that we exist. The subject is older than Plato, but precedent, though passionately embraced, does not prepare us for the shock of being. 'I held myself, first born,' says Streckfus. Then: 'I heard a voice in my ear.' Then: 'I felt my language torn from my mouth, writhing on the deck like an eel out of water.' To exist in Errings is to experience one's own language as an alien tongue while finding oneself miraculously capable of understanding it. To read the poems is to experience a similar ecstasy, for their language feels simultaneously erotic and chaste, ancient and avant-garde. Streckfus makes the act of reading feel as thrilling, syllable by syllable, as the fact of being alive--'you my young thing, you shaped like a mouse, like an ear.' No other poet of his generation coaxes from such a sternly disciplined instrument such ravishingly lyrical music."--James Longenbach
"If you read and admired (as I did) Peter Streckfus's Yale-Younger The Cuckoo published a decade back, then it's a no brainer to cozy up to these new acts of collusion while spreading yourself out on green heather."--Coldfront Magazine
"Errings offers the best of both the bay side and ocean side of the street. Some of its poems, readers can immediately enter and understand, and others take a bit more archeological digging. Readers will find poems quiet as a bay sunset and as turbulent as Atlantic waves...If you find yourself somewhat lost at sea in this collection on first read, do not swim immediately back to shore. Tread water boldly and curiously with all senses alert and wide open. You will eventually find your way in the language and will be glad you took the extra time."--Poet's Quarterly
About the Author
Peter Streckfus is Professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Table of Contents
1
Heather Green
Videos of Fish
Patrimony
Erring
2
New Rules of the Oan Era (1372)
Suggestions for a New Day (1452)
Additional New Rules, Suggestions for a New Day, and Cetera (1502)
Una Narrazione
A Bridge, The Pilgrims
A Bridge, Election
3
The Reader 54
Bildungsroman
Time Ghazal
Earth and Water
The Lake and the Skiff
Transmigration
Notes
Acknowledgements