What do you think?
Rate this book
Amaranth
In one of the most important of the Aztec festivals, a month of fasting was ended by observers of the fast cutting up the figurine of a god made of amaranth seeds and honey and sharing it in small pieces. In Amaranth, Robert Carr feeds his readers portions of a god fashioned out of terror, longing, infidelity, wasting sickness, humor, and a searing lyrical tenderness. Crafted with the fingers of a careful and nimble musicianship, these poems vibrate with a current that simultaneously sets the teeth on edge and soothes the agitation the words produce. Even the most casual reader will be astonished by the muscular audacity of these poems--and pleasured by the harsh honey that flows from the poet's deft pillaging of the heart's unease. This is a remarkable debut.
--Tom Daley
The poetic drama in Amaranth arises from Robert Carr's intuition that a healthy enabling relation to one's past depends on an unflinching re-encounter with the details of the past. The poems choose not to settle for comfortable "lessons"--instead, they swim down, bravely, into haunted caverns of memory, seeking affirmations inseparable from the facts of moments, as in "Cremation," where the difference between two kinds of powder does it all.
--Mark Halliday
Slow, deliberate, and finely wrought, the poems in Amaranth remind the mouth that it has a tongue, remind the ear that it has a heart. Robert Carr's expressive voice is spare, honest, precise, and inventive as his poems careen from the furnace of love to the brutality of death all while offering the reader a gorgeous lyrical accuracy that's both delicate and unforgiving.
--Ada Limon
Robert Carr was born in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in New Hampshire. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and a MEd in counseling psychology from the University of Massachusetts. He is Deputy Director, Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Amaranth is his first collection.
--Tom Daley
The poetic drama in Amaranth arises from Robert Carr's intuition that a healthy enabling relation to one's past depends on an unflinching re-encounter with the details of the past. The poems choose not to settle for comfortable "lessons"--instead, they swim down, bravely, into haunted caverns of memory, seeking affirmations inseparable from the facts of moments, as in "Cremation," where the difference between two kinds of powder does it all.
--Mark Halliday
Slow, deliberate, and finely wrought, the poems in Amaranth remind the mouth that it has a tongue, remind the ear that it has a heart. Robert Carr's expressive voice is spare, honest, precise, and inventive as his poems careen from the furnace of love to the brutality of death all while offering the reader a gorgeous lyrical accuracy that's both delicate and unforgiving.
--Ada Limon
Robert Carr was born in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in New Hampshire. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and a MEd in counseling psychology from the University of Massachusetts. He is Deputy Director, Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Amaranth is his first collection.
- GenresPoetry
48 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2016
2 people are currently reading
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 26, 2019
Robert Carr's debut book of poems is filled with precision emblematic of his life and career. He comes to poetry from a successful work history in Public Health where he worked through the AIDS epidemic. His poems are layered with strong imagery, intricate details, rich color, and heart felt emotions about family, gay relationships, sex, death, nature which intertwine in this short book.
In one of my favorite poems, "The Flower Show," walking with his mother he writes,
"Mama melts away beneath the shoulders
of her butter yellow suit. We hold tight to arms,
to the handles of a borrowed chair. Winter
cheekboned eyes cast the red-rimmed
pouch of orchids as we wheel the flower show."
Further down after seeing the
"Koi turn slowly in their lotus pool, chair spokes
catch the crease of her yellow jacket—ruined. Manikins
wear crowns of sunlit replica, water streams
over the drilled skull of a fountain globe. Smiling,
she asks if I remember bathing in her sink."
This poems is a loving relatable scene brought vividly alive.
In an earlier poem, "Clay," he writes in third person of a child who is sexually abused by a mother's boyfriend, Clay. We are with the child after the mother reads to him and tucks him in, "An inverted L of light appears and disappears./The door silently opens and closes./The flashlight's green eye approaches,/he can't see the blue-veined hand that holds it./Playing possum—his darting eyes open just a crack/as three-ringed light scans the rodeo of his pajamas—//" This poem exposes the violation that are far too common, the mother's blindness, the disassociation, which is the last line of the poem: "the boy imagines Charlotte/in her web and goes to sit beside her."
His language is well tuned. The poems gut real. In the poem "The Holiday Poem" he is invited to not read a poem at the holiday dinner table, his father has brought a Mary Oliver poem to read instead. He writes, "It seems not everyone/enjoys tears at the table/or the blood of dead mothers/in their cranberry sauce." This is his writing in a nutshell: tears, blood, death, speaking truth. I have his next book, "The Unbuttoned Eye," and look forward to reading it soon.
In one of my favorite poems, "The Flower Show," walking with his mother he writes,
"Mama melts away beneath the shoulders
of her butter yellow suit. We hold tight to arms,
to the handles of a borrowed chair. Winter
cheekboned eyes cast the red-rimmed
pouch of orchids as we wheel the flower show."
Further down after seeing the
"Koi turn slowly in their lotus pool, chair spokes
catch the crease of her yellow jacket—ruined. Manikins
wear crowns of sunlit replica, water streams
over the drilled skull of a fountain globe. Smiling,
she asks if I remember bathing in her sink."
This poems is a loving relatable scene brought vividly alive.
In an earlier poem, "Clay," he writes in third person of a child who is sexually abused by a mother's boyfriend, Clay. We are with the child after the mother reads to him and tucks him in, "An inverted L of light appears and disappears./The door silently opens and closes./The flashlight's green eye approaches,/he can't see the blue-veined hand that holds it./Playing possum—his darting eyes open just a crack/as three-ringed light scans the rodeo of his pajamas—//" This poem exposes the violation that are far too common, the mother's blindness, the disassociation, which is the last line of the poem: "the boy imagines Charlotte/in her web and goes to sit beside her."
His language is well tuned. The poems gut real. In the poem "The Holiday Poem" he is invited to not read a poem at the holiday dinner table, his father has brought a Mary Oliver poem to read instead. He writes, "It seems not everyone/enjoys tears at the table/or the blood of dead mothers/in their cranberry sauce." This is his writing in a nutshell: tears, blood, death, speaking truth. I have his next book, "The Unbuttoned Eye," and look forward to reading it soon.
Read
July 24, 2019Robert Carr is a 2017 Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His chapbook, Amaranth, was published in 2016 by Indolent Books.
Amaranth is divided into three sections – Prince’s Feather, Goosefoot, and Wormseed
Prince’s feather, goosefoot, and wormseed are all varieties of amaranth, which is a group of grains that has been cultivated for thousands of years. These grains were once considered a staple food in the Inca, Maya and Aztec civilizations.
In an interview by Jon Riccio, which appeared in Sonora Review, Carr said:
The launching point for the book was the Keats epigraph, “The spirit culls unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays through the old garden ground of boyish days.” I knew this first collection would dig the ground of my childhood though today, age 56. The shadow field of sexual fantasy and reality, the deaths of men through the AIDS epidemic, the death of my mother, sexual excess and physical survival.
These poems are tight and well-controlled. The one I find myself returning to repeatedly is “The Holiday Poem,” where the speaker reads his poems every year at the family Christmas meal. One year he was “told explicitly, Don’t.” His sister declared it “the best Christmas ever!” and the speaker concludes:
It seems not everyone
enjoys tears at the table
or the blood of dead mothers
in their cranberry sauce.
I laugh through my tears as I read this, as the vast majority of my family poems are about deceased loved ones, and I have been asked to please not read any more dead baby poems.
Carr’s imagery and similes are refreshingly unique.
the hawk cocky
as a bar stool drunk
with a bowie.
(Hawk)
and in “Acadia:”
Words come at me
like handfuls of low bush blueberries
that miss an open mouth.
I sit between my stanzas
and a stack of piled flat stones.
Amaranth is divided into three sections – Prince’s Feather, Goosefoot, and Wormseed
Prince’s feather, goosefoot, and wormseed are all varieties of amaranth, which is a group of grains that has been cultivated for thousands of years. These grains were once considered a staple food in the Inca, Maya and Aztec civilizations.
In an interview by Jon Riccio, which appeared in Sonora Review, Carr said:
The launching point for the book was the Keats epigraph, “The spirit culls unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays through the old garden ground of boyish days.” I knew this first collection would dig the ground of my childhood though today, age 56. The shadow field of sexual fantasy and reality, the deaths of men through the AIDS epidemic, the death of my mother, sexual excess and physical survival.
These poems are tight and well-controlled. The one I find myself returning to repeatedly is “The Holiday Poem,” where the speaker reads his poems every year at the family Christmas meal. One year he was “told explicitly, Don’t.” His sister declared it “the best Christmas ever!” and the speaker concludes:
It seems not everyone
enjoys tears at the table
or the blood of dead mothers
in their cranberry sauce.
I laugh through my tears as I read this, as the vast majority of my family poems are about deceased loved ones, and I have been asked to please not read any more dead baby poems.
Carr’s imagery and similes are refreshingly unique.
the hawk cocky
as a bar stool drunk
with a bowie.
(Hawk)
and in “Acadia:”
Words come at me
like handfuls of low bush blueberries
that miss an open mouth.
I sit between my stanzas
and a stack of piled flat stones.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews