Lay Ghost

by Nathaniel Mackey

Lay Ghost, a set of eight poems drawn from Nathaniel Mackey’s intertwined and continuous serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” epitomizes the roving, ruminative poetics that have continued to animate his “long song,” for nearly five decades. Lay Ghost’s band of sojourners persist in their restless travel, passing, in these poems, through such venues as Wrack Tavern, Mu, the Stick City Ashram, Zar, Rag City, Philadelphia, Lagos, and Scratch Point. Both the travelers and the poems offer fraught dispatches beset by memory, tenuous futurity, momentary impulse, and metaphysical wish, while weaving a sustained oneiric chorus surging with lyrical and mystical play.

http://www.blackocean.org/catalog1/la...

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mackey's work continues to be strong in this edition which is a subset of his upcoming full length, a continuation of his song. That it is only a sampling leaves the reader with a demanding desire for the greater picture.

[Michael Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book of poetry since reading "The Hangman's Lament" by Henrik Nordbrandt about / at least ten years prior. Not that I'm well versed in living poets, but Mackey's verse is easily the most potent combination of language, content, and form that I've experienced in a long time. I hope all of the Song of Andoumboulou is collected at some point so I can read it all at once. There are legends of Lemuria, Mu, and Atlantis, but this is all of them at once, with all of the boundaries of time between them finally broken down. I still owe him a dollar too. (Thanks for the reading, and making it happen in Charlotte.)