Errings

Poets Out Loud

by Peter Streckfus

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent―a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born―and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. “Videos of Fish,” the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet’s late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysical
philosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. “How difficult it is to remain one person,” the poet claims, echoing Czesław Miłosz; in its progress between persons, the collection’s regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet,
the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and the miniature.

THE READER
Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field.


Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, like
an oar, its surface turned to the light.

Blacken now and lift your news into the air.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2014

About the author

Peter Streckfus is the author of two poetry books: Errings, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2013 POL Editor’s Prize, and The Cuckoo, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2003. His poems appear in journals such as The Chicago Review, The New Republic, Seattle Review, and Slate. His awards include fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the University of Alabama, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome, where he is the 2013-14 Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, poet and translator Heather Green, and is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at George Mason University.