Portable Planet (Leaping Dog Press Book, # 1) - Softcover

Shaffer, Eric Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587750007 ISBN 13: 9781587750007

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press, 2002

Synopsis

Poetry. "PORTABLE PLANET is a marvelous book. I've been following Shaffer's work for years and he is on a definitive upward spiral"-Jim Harrison. "Graced by the best from the past, the poet wanders. His poems will take you to places you need to visit"-Steve Sanfield. "Eric Paul Shaffer's poems carry us ever inward and out, where particular stones sprout wings, where solid ground is shaken by the nimble fingers of small gods, and the normal everyday ways of life stay blessedly themselves. These poems are portable, they're the exact same size as the hip pocket of your mind"-John Kain.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry, most recently LAHAINA NOON: NA MELE O MAUI: POEMS, which received an "Award of Excellence" in the Hawai'i Book Publishers Association's 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards. More than 250 of his poems have been published in local, national, and international magazines, and in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War and The Soul Unearthed. His short fiction appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Bakunin, Prose Ax, and Natural Bridge, and in two chapbooks of fiction selected from BURN & LEARN: You Are Here (Obscure Publications) and The Felony Stick (Leaping Dog Press). Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and he was a 2006 Fellow at the annual Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop and Retreat at Wallowa Lake near Enterprise, Oregon. He lives with his wife Veronica and two rambunctious sister cats on a ridge overlooking Kalihi. He teaches composition and literature at Honolulu Community College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Far from the House, I Climb"

Alone in the snow,
among pines, far from the house,
I climb.

Up a thin bole, snapping limbs, flaking
trunks, higher than the hilltop
our old house settles in.

I see winter blue through brown
cones and thick green needles,
and struggle up quick, then stuck.

What is solid, sways.
I'm a white monkey wondering in air.
How did I climb into cloudless blue?

Look around. The house, the hill.
The tree trembles, tilts,
shaking snow onto snow.

Gazing down the bole
at branches and bark
darkening drifts, I trace

my blank-soled footprints
backward through snow
I crossed from high, heated,

knotted, wooden rooms, leaving.
From one tree among lines of pines
in Michigan woods,

a forest is a history, a family
treed by rising too far --
a trunk too thin,

branches too thick to mount further.
I almost hear the hounds. The house is lost
in branches, and I freeze to the tree.

I can ascend no higher.
Deer browse the limbs below.
I cling to the trunk

as did ancestors of ancient descent,
lithe little climbers with wide eyes and brains
too big to bear,

waiting while the tree, the world, grows
large enough, or dark enough,
to deliver me.

Edition details

• Publisher: Leaping Dog Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587750007
• ISBN 13: 9781587750007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144