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Rock That Is Not a Rabbit, The: Poems
Meditative Poems That Ask, What If “We Change and Change / But Don’t Change Back?”
Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.
Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
Published October 10, 2023
5 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2024
The speakers in these poems encounter the forest and other wild spaces with the same good humor and longing for wisdom as they do their own interior lives or the artifacts of fallen civilizations. Marks’s poems invite a mature wonder we don’t allow ourselves much anymore, with language tuned for possibility more than explanation.
October 1, 2024
Favorite poem: "Elegy for a Satellite":
There are two ways to die:
you could fall into the air
that would peel you, flame after flame,
or you could rise, beyond the bustle
of other satellites that keep
eyeing us, and settle farther,
in a graveyard orbit,
like a thought tucked away [ . . . ]
There are two ways to die:
you could fall into the air
that would peel you, flame after flame,
or you could rise, beyond the bustle
of other satellites that keep
eyeing us, and settle farther,
in a graveyard orbit,
like a thought tucked away [ . . . ]
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews