From Second Draft:
What other people learn
From birth,
Betrayal,
I learned late.
My soul perched
On an olive branch
Combing itself,
Waving its plumes. I said
Being mortal,
I aspire to
Mortal things.
I need you,
Said my soul,
If you're telling the truth.
Draft of a Letter is a book about belief--not belief in the unknowable
but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we
inhabit, the words we speak, these poems discover infinitude in the most
familiar places. The revelation is disorienting and, as a result, these
poems talk to themselves, revise themselves, fashioning a dialogue
between self and soul that opens outward to include other voices,
lovers, children, angels, and ghosts. For James Longenbach, great
distance makes the messages we send sweeter. To be divided from
ourselves is never to be alone. "If the kingdom is in the sky," says the
body to the soul, "Birds will get there before you." "In time," says the
awakening soul, "I liked my second / Body better / Than the first." To
live, these poems insist, is to arise every day to the strange
magnificence of the people and places we thought we knew best. Draft of
a Letter is an unsettled and radiant paradiso, imagined in the
death-shadowed, birth-haunted middle of a long life.
Praise for Fleet River
"A sensibility this cogent, this subtle and austere is rare; even rarer
is its proof that poetry still flows through all things and transforms
all things in the process."--Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book
Review
