Song & Error: Poems

By Averill Curdy

A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice

A sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.
In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466880696

Averill Curdy

Averill Curdy was born in the Pacific Northwest, where she worked as an arts administrator and in the software industry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others, and her poems have appeared widely in both the United States and England. She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

DEDICATION

Sparrow Trapped in the Airport

Commute

Hardware

Visiting the Largest Live Rattlesnake Exhibit in North America

Ovid in America

Song & Error

Anatomical Angel

The Preservation of Meat

See They Return and Bring Us with Them

The God of Inattention

Chimera

Northwest Passage

On a Painting by a Member of the Northwest Visionary School

From My Father’s Garden

The Lizard

Single Room

From the Lost Correspondence

The Fair Incognito

When I was beautiful

To the Voice of the Retired Warden of Huntsville Prison (Texas Death Chamber)

Evidence

Dark Room

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

COPYRIGHT

FOR MY FATHER

AND TO THE MEMORY

OF MY MOTHER

SPARROW TRAPPED IN THE AIRPORT

Never the bark and abalone mask

Cracked by storms of a mastering god,

Never the gods’ favored glamour, never

The pelagic messenger bearing orchards

In its beak, never allegory, not wisdom

Or valor or cunning, much less hunger

Demanding vigilance, industry, invention,

Or the instinct to claim some small rise

Above the plain and from there to assert

The song of another day ending;

Lentil-brown, uncounted, overlooked

In the clamorous public of the flock

So unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,

Faces shining with oils of their many miles,

Where it hops and scratches below

The baggage carousel and lights too high,

Too bright for any real illumination,

Looking more like a fumbled punch line

Than a stowaway whose carriage

Recalls how lightly we once traveled.

COMMUTE

     So her glassed, gold-vermeiled eye won’t burn up

In light; so she doesn’t blink and lose her quarry,

     She who hunts by night closes her extra eyelid.

That membrane lucent as a veil of marble chiseled,

     Then ground with seven degrees of stone, so the veil

Appears to float, riding the tidal breaths of this,

     Last hour of night, first hour of day, Hour of the Goat,

When through my sleep light penetrates, portends.

     Sound: I dream the news—barking headlines forged

With song, C’mon over here from over there, girl—

     And wake, chased, into the publicity of morning.

My minimal devotions. Three times, for contacts,

     Teeth, mascara, I bow to the basin and I do not think,

Do not ask that this short day make