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    Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
    Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
    Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
    Ebook96 pages34 minutes

    Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

    By Luisa A. Igloria

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    About this ebook

    “When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe."
    —Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award

    The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUtah State University Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9780874219791
    Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

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      Book preview

      Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser - Luisa A. Igloria

      Ruben

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Mark Doty

      I

      Wanderer

      Derecho Ghazal

      My Love, I Want to Tell You of Today

      Dear Epictetus, This is to You Attributed

      How to Flinch

      Landscape, with an End and a Beginning

      Campus Elegy

      Landscape, with Red Boots and a Branch of Dead Cherry

      Boy

      Why Appropriation Is Not Necessarily the Same as Mastery

      Certified

      With Feeling

      Persistent Triolet

      What You Don’t Always See

      Appetite

      Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter

      Intercession

      Closer

      Wake

      II

      Mondo Inteirinho

      Anniversary

      A Single Falling Note Above

      Grenadilla

      Saturday Afternoon at the Y

      On the Nature of Things

      Unbelievable Ends

      In a Hotel Lobby, Near Midnight

      Landscape, with Cardinal and Earring

      Empty Ghazal

      Letter to Providence

      Letter to Arrhythmia

      Letter to Levity

      Interior, with Roman Shades and Lovers

      Recursive

      Taxonomies

      Lover to Lover, Air

      Imperfect Ode

      Villanelle of the Red Maple

      Love Poem with Skull and Candy Valentines

      Landscape, with Remnants of a Tale

      Landscape, with Darkness and Hare

      Not Yet There

      III

      Hum

      Dumbwaiter

      Spangled

      Ghazal: Chimerae

      I Write Letters to Some Other Sea

      Improvisations

      Fata Morgana

      Aubade

      Letter to Love

      Landscape, with Mockingbird and Ripe Figs

      Mobius

      What Cannot Eat

      Landscape, with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting

      Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

      Unending Lyric

      Ghazal of the Transcendental

      Night Heron, Ascending

      The Wren in the Lilac Cycles through Its Songs at Breakneck Speed

      Reprieve

      Hallucinatorio

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      The May Swenson Poetry Award

      FOREWORD

      Luisa A. Igloria frames the first poem in this lush, unexpected book with a quote from Epictetus: ". . . as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, / and another comes in its place." The Stoic philosopher may offer this principle as a cause for detachment, but Igloria, I’d hazard, sees things differently: transience, if not exactly cause for celebration, is for her an occasion for the new to present itself. Her poems are drunk with the world’s bounty; they fill themselves with life: birds and flowers, Dürer’s engravings, tattooed mothers swimming at the Y, fruits whose flavors could hardly be more delicious than their names: carambola, grenadilla, maracuya. The solid ground on which her poems rest is love for the world in all its pungent variety. A goodly part of what I mean by love is close attention, a profound interest in and regard for what’s out there. Igloria’s poetry is a kind of tally, an accounting, a guide to the spectacle of the given, the strangeness and complexity of what surrounds us. Here, she seems to say to her readers, I’d like you to look here and

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