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    Cold Pastoral: Poems
    Cold Pastoral: Poems
    Cold Pastoral: Poems
    Ebook76 pages45 minutes

    Cold Pastoral: Poems

    By Rebecca Dunham

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    About this ebook

    FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY)

    A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster.

    On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral.

    In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.”

    Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateFeb 20, 2017
    ISBN9781571319395
    Cold Pastoral: Poems

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      Book preview

      Cold Pastoral - Rebecca Dunham

      MNEMOSYNE TO THE POET

      For you, memory is but

      an oil lamp to snuff, left to

      smoke. Diademed by earth’s

      velvet mantle. So easy

      for you to ignore: hadal

      press of sea, the open

      vein’s plumes,

      how they wheel like

      a maelstrom up and down.

      My sight spills through

      waves of old, blown

      glass. I am not permitted

      to turn, pillow to cheek,

      and wait for sleep to find me.

      Am not permitted

      to learn how not to look.

      ELEGY, WIND-WHIPPED

      May 23, 2011, Joplin, Missouri

      1. REFUSE

      Doll hair—brown yarn—

      loops round a hickory’s jagged

      limb and she dances

      the wind like a human body

      clinched above

      the gallows. See—your own

      eyes stitched open as hers—

      there is no difference, batting

      or flesh, still you will

      hang, emptied by my breath.

      She could be dead. Easily

      she could be your daughter.

      2. HAMPSHIRE TERRACE

      Search and mark with a spray-

      painted X. Nothing left

      to salvage. You do not like

      to say it, but you need

      the dogs. No tools you possess

      can help you find silence.

      We’re always hopeful but we briefed

      the guys to plan for the worst.

      Crowbar, chainsaw, chisel

      you dig, hail beating.

      In time, you think,

      please let me be in time.

      3. LIST

      Tilt, slant, heel—a careening, a leaning, to one side. Incline. To please, to like, to desire. To cut away in narrow strips, stave and plank, to shear. To lister: to furrow the land—plow and drill—drop and cover. Who is the one that compiles? Roll clouds scroll the sky. Call it and we will listen: anything but there is no list, there is no

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