Goat Funeral

by Christopher Bakken

"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." —Richard Howard

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published December 11, 2006

Reviews

[Stacy McCullough. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The man who made me a poet.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

He had me with "Duet With Fernando Pessoa." "...a votive geometry / known only to those versed in my Jesuit liturgy of the senses / a new music swelling the topsails of the altar-boys' tongues..."
Wonderful poet.

[Jamison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Movement is the key to this book. About half the poems surprise the reader in the way they cleverly (and insightfully) link observations together. However, the other half of the poems lack this energetic momentum. As a result, the poems' musicality creates an off balance/intrusively energetic tone in the more meditative poems and accentuates/compliments the tone in the others.