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King
Vulture
Poems by K. E. Duffin
A
first book from this accomplished formalist poet
This
stunning collection heralds the debut of a most gifted poet,
one who turns to the formal traditions of the past to celebrate
and elegize our vast and transient world in which human
stories—tragedies and triumphs—are invariably
bound up with nature. K. E. Duffin’s poems are about
transformations, from life to death and from death to life,
from the sprawl of experience to the spare music of the
poem that can reach the future only through memory. These
are poems that court the ear and eye alike. They surprise
us with their elegant forms and rich, classical themes;
they delight us with their force of language and delicious
renderings of the vast complications of things.
“[E]ven
those without paranormal powers can reasonably speculate
that K. E. Duffin will be among the poets most discussed
over the next couple of decades.”
—Alfred
Corn, author of Stake: Poems, 1972–1992
“In
her many sonnets and rhymed quatrains, Duffin makes the
old forms sing with a baroque splendor as she travels from
New England to Siberia, Naples to Yucatan, Iceland to Jersey.
. . . With the eyes of a naturalist and a traditionalist,
Duffin’s high-flying persona ‘drifts in and
out of worlds.’ As readers, we can only stand below
and watch the poetic flights with admiration and awe.”
—Henry
Hart, author of The Rooster Mask
K.
E. Duffin is a painter and print-maker who
finds inspiration in the art of the ancient world. She graduated
from Harvard University and attended the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston. Her poems have appeared in a number
of journals, including Poetry, Partisan Review, Ploughshares,
Verse, and the Sewanee Review. She has been
a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman
Award, and the Colorado Prize. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
February
2005
120 pages, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
$16.95 Paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-785-4 | 1-55728-785-6
Harbor
at Old Saybrook
Where
pageantries of peril flow quickly,
a nightmare sea is breaking panes from below
with stunted fists, but the lid of ice is heavy,
and its fine ebony crazings barely show,
except near the burly pier. A translucent crust
on blackened caramel pulls from the pilings,
leaving a moss of dampness where the water crests,
sloppy tar with cowlicks of wave, leaping,
lapping, in faint starlight. Every sound
skitters on stilts, or groans like a glacier calving.
In seaward darkness, a multiple birth of islands
rides the slick horizon; a ship’s bell rings.
The body, like a pharaoh, covets the frost.
At two degrees, things are preserved, not lost. |
