Antiquity

By Michael Homolka and Mary Ruefle

"The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice."—Mary Ruefle, from the introduction

 

Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Michael Homolka’s Antiquity offers the present infused with the past, from Ancient Greece to the Holocaust to contemporary battlefields. A haunting and evocative debut.

 

Michael Homolka lives and works in New York City. Homolka’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781941411285

Book preview

Introduction

The book you are holding in your hands is called Antiquity, and it’s filled with poems as new as April crocuses. Or as old as April crocuses, for as John Berger points out, if poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, it has nothing to do with individual genius, but with the fact that poetry abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future. The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is flexible in its adherence / to a particular time period. Hence a poem set at the mall but written after Martial, hence Napoleon off / at boarding school, hence Listen Up Medusa, hence He who had pretended to be dead / pops up out of the cart. Like a crocus, we could say. What’s antiquity anyway but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then.

And so: could be Goshen, land of the Israelites, could be Goshen, New Jersey. We have our floods, our epidemics, our wars. Each of us seems convinced he is the sole member of the family running home from the battle at Marathon bearing / good news We have fought bravely and survived. Of course no one survives, but the book’s subjects—history, paintings, language—are things that have survived thus far, to the extent we are tempted to ask a