Skylight

By Antony Di Nardo

In this superb new collection of poetry, Antony Di Nardo explores the interplay between a disintegrating natural world and the human observer, a relationship characterized by both beauty and terror. “A talking tree, a talking tree / in the language of dead leaves” ends a poem in the award-winning suite, “May June July,” where cancer cells are constellations and gardens a “photosynthetic success.” This is poetry with an ear to the ground, an ear for the unexpected. Partly feral, partly tamed and sometimes formal, the poems in Skylight illuminate shadows in the rough and clarify the spark found between observer and observed. The subjects roam: birdlife, clouds and cities, still lives, the sign of the Crab, small rooms, food courts, the skylight above a bed. In Di Nardo’s hands, these are both objects and ideas that words manipulate to create an aesthetic that privileges artifice and revels in its syntax, image, and element of surprise. The poetry both entertains and acknowledges what words can do, like nothing else can, to create experience and bear witness. Trees dominate, a fool hen comes crashing into a house, people make travel plans to leave themselves behind — Skylight is a record of what we miss in the world inside and outside our windows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781553805458

Antony Di Nardo

Antony Di Nardo is a poet and teacher. He currently divides his time between Beirut, Lebanon—where he teaches English at International College—and central Canada. He is the author of two previous collections of poems: Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books, 2010) and Soul on Standby (Exile Editions, 2010).

Book preview

Skylight

Basquiat at the AGO had a painting repurposed

that worked itself into our everyday spaces.

On plates and vessels and parts of the sky

he boxed in the light so we could see it for ourselves.

I saw some words in it I thought I could use:

scarlet, rose, vermilion, shades of the trickster.

I saw my late uncle sit for a portrait.

Words in a bubble. Thoughts in a cloud.

I saw the intensity of knowing what we know

and from where it comes.

Artifice and invention on walls and windows.

Art lovers everywhere.

The gift shop was bright and spacious.

Articulate even. Art to pin on a chest.

As for the presence of anyone who might

read a poem, I couldn’t say.

Opus Erectus

Autumn

Autumn sets up a tripod.

The trees stripped down.

Mountains where once there were none.

I walk ablaze with old romantics, Auden

rendering under heaven cause to be awed

by this dominant absence of leaves,

something entirely meant for me.

I’m sucked in by the barren beauty of the missing

and gone. A last minute lark in the branches,

here when everyone else has left,

sings a sorry jingle I know well.

Soil in the garden boxes, rotting,

cold and wet, dead and wishing for winter.

As for me it’s the sun and its heat today,

first of November, that keeps me working,

hanging up leaves: ironic, neurotic,

forgetful, pressings and opinions,

written on the backs of these trees.

Remains

Reeds in the rushes, flutes in a quiver,

the last notes of a Grecian fall, a study in the art

of ruins. Sounds of the bent, broken,

and dun. Remains, in other words.

A triceratops, dead on its back, all bark

and bones, takes on a transparent lustre

off the morning light from the wedge of the moon.

Its bloated belly at the bottom of the marsh.

A distant relative, blue jay, comes to pay its respects,

has the jitters, perches,

preaches from the branches of the