Works and Days (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Mayes, Edward Kleinschmidt; Kleinschmidt, Mayes; Kleinschmidt, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822957086 ISBN 13: 9780822957089

Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr, 1999

Synopsis

1999 AWP Winner Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes carouses-playfully, deliciously-through the Italian countryside with his latest collection of poems. Like Hesiod's Works and Days, Mayes's collection explores the art of living and the transformations of one's life while working the land as a farmer. In his hand, the estatic and elegiac meet, shifting from a wide angle lens to the immediacy of the kitchen table, from Newton's revelations to the death of his parents.

Written as an abecedarius, each poem's title begins with a different letter of the Italian alphabet, from Ago (needle) to Zappa (hoe). Often beginning a poem on the word that ended the last, he strings his readers along on denotation and double meaning-slight detours that take us from here to there, from Ovid shouting at his dog to our eternal quarrel with time. We follow this poet and his words, delighting in the movement, continually transported by sudden evocations of emotion that hit close to the heart. Mayes, known for his complex play with linguistic roots and for hard-driving tensile forms, extends his reach into the Italian language. As he farms his little plot of Tuscan soil, he introduces Italian phrases with a sense of wonder and pleasure, reminding us of our attraction for the word-imagination made flesh. He comes to realize that his "fields are poetry and olives" and his furrows and lines are seeded with Dante, and Virgil, Robert Johnson and Jussi Bjorling.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes's previous books include First Language (Juniper Prize), To Remain (Ges Award), and Magnetism (Poetry Award from Bay Area Book Reviewers Association), and his most recent, Bodysong. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Best American Poetry, among others. He received a 1997 National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Center at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco with his wife, writer Frances Mayes.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from Qua

Quaggiu: in this world, in this life. The point the needle makes

isn't quite enough to see through, to see over there, l.

These were the words we used the summer of 1991, qui/qua-

here where we are. Li/l-there where we will be.

The four Polish men who helped us clear fields taught us their tu/tam,

Pick up this rock tu and move it tam.

These tanned working bodies of ours, children of Sisyphus, moved half a world

in this life, hither and thither, il mondo di qua, this world.

If out fo the quarrel with time we make tracks, and if out of

the quarrel with fate, we make book, or if out of the quarrel with Italians,

we make pasta, or if out of the quarrel with God, we make believe,

and if out of the quarrel with our bodies, we make love,

then qui per qui, here's the here and now.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822957086
• ISBN 13: 9780822957089
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 59