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 youтАЩre telling the truth.
Draft of a Letter is a book about beliefтАФnot 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. тАЬIf the kingdom is in the sky,тАЭ says the body to the soul, тАЬBirds will get there before you.тАЭ тАЬIn time,тАЭ says the awakening soul, тАЬI liked my second / Body better / Than the first.тАЭ 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
тАЬA 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.тАЭтАФCarol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review