Photographing Eden: Poems

By Hal S. Barron

Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray’s poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9780821443019

Hal S. Barron

Hal S. Barron, author of Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England, is professor of history at Harvey Mudd College and a member of the history faculty at the Claremont Graduate School in California.

Book preview

/

Yet one looks out

in an early morning hour such as this one,

watching a sparkling grackle land

upon a roof, and one imagines noon,

when every object clarifies itself

in sunlight, void of mind and shadow,

and is itself alone, a thick

beak, or iridescent wing.

—Ben Howard

A Field Guide to the Dark

Splice together both ends of the same wire.

You’ve tied off an empty circle,

A collar for Argos, and his leash will be

Strands of black hair knotted at your wrist.

He’s as old as you feel, so let him guide you

Through field and forest, shadows gray, black,

And the dark’s own phosphorescence,

The excited glow slowly fading out,

But not until you’ve followed it