Ladder of Cranes
1st Edition
Published on 15. March 2015
57 pages
978-1-60223-258-7 (ISBN)
Description
Whether watching men releasing caged birds at dawn in New York City or a ladder of cranes rising from a field in Manitoba, Tom Sexton is a keen observer of the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds. The former Alaska poet laureate takes to the road in this new collection, wending a lyrical and at times mystical path between Alaska and New England.Travelers along the way include the fabled wolf of Gubbio, old and lame and long past his taming encounter with Saint Francis of Assisi, and Chinese poet Li Bai chanting to a Yangtze River dolphin. Yet, while Sexton s journey crosses borders and occasionally centuries his ultimate destination is always the landscape and people of Alaska. A Ladder of Cranes showcases Sexton s mastery of both traditional forms and free verse. The tensions of his formal influences, Chinese and European, force the reader to experience these spare lines and tight observations in stunning new ways.
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Content
- Intro
- Contents
- The Bird Walkers of Roosevelt Park
- Pied-billed Grebe on the Concord River
- At the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts
- Blueberry Barren at Dusk
- Eastport, Maine
- Star Marrow
- First Anna's Hummingbird Sighted in Newfoundland
- Statue of a Union Soldier
- A Ladder of Cranes
- White-tailed Buck in a Pasture
- Winter Thaw
- Glass Eels
- Po Chu¨-I's Cook
- Mozart's Starling
- On the Death of Seamus Heaney
- Innisfree, Western Alberta
- Mundare, Alberta
- The Wolf of Gubbio
- Gray Wolf
- Medieval Bestiary: The Wolf
- Killing the Kenai Peninsula's Wolves
- Fall Raspberries
- Fireweed
- Insomnia
- To the Chinese Poets
- Black Spruce
- Fall Migration
- To the Poet John Haines on His Eighty-fifth Birthday
- Resolution Park
- The Man from Here
- Galaxies
- The Church at Ninilchik, Alaska
- Swans on Cook Inlet
- Solitude
- After Walking in Rain on a Sunday Morning
- Reading Li Bai While the Moon Rises
- Magpie at Twilight
- Looking at the Ferry Museum's Salish Baskets
- Starring, Western Alaska
- The Loon at Shackford Head
- Cow Moose and Magpie
- Cloudberry Wine
- Our Hand-carved Ornament of a Great Blue Heron
- President Harding's Pullman Car, Fairbanks, Alaska
- Westchester Lagoon
- The Mist Net
- Reading Housman's "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now"
- A Needle's Eye
- A Little Poem for the Stars
- Alder Catkins
- Alder Catkins after Rain
- Poem Written on the Winter Solstice
- On Being Asked to Write a Poem about the Moon
- European Starling
- American Dipper
- Independence Mine, August
- The Advent Bear
