The Mirrormaker: Poems
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About this ebook
Songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw follows up The Stuntman with another collection that fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song “Girl from the North Country.” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.
In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—”The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea” —and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download.
Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.
“Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out . . . living proof that the bard is still with us.” —Gillian Conoley
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The Mirrormaker - Brian Laidlaw
I.
Echo’s Ailments
to call something harmless admits
a certain potential
for harm (love is not & neither
is unknowing)—
homes on dead-flats sink
into prairie sinks; gradations
from landslide to landfall
to rock-fall to rockabilly to rock-a-bye
bifurcate the county—
we watch half a mountain collapse
like a stroked face, then we
help the half that didn’t
collapse collapse
Hatches
tallnorthcountrygirl is the tallest
landmark
man looks up her skirt
madams too whistling
downtown
(she necessitates downtown)—I would like your eye
level, I would like a haystack to climb
your effervescence
tallnorthcountrygirl thrills
the bees of the brush
I love you so much I want you
to walk in a trench wheresoever
you walk
beside me
here
I’ll dig it
Iron Ironworker
the world’s largest handwritten promise, the world’s largesse
the largest choir of mouthless, of