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    Travel in My Borrowed Lives: New and Selected Poems
    Travel in My Borrowed Lives: New and Selected Poems
    Travel in My Borrowed Lives: New and Selected Poems
    Ebook175 pages1 hour

    Travel in My Borrowed Lives: New and Selected Poems

    By Donald Everett Axinn and Jay Parini

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    About this ebook

    For almost half a century, Donald Everett Axinn has been writing poetry in which, as Jay Parini notes in his introduction, "the stamp of individuality, the personal voice of the poet, lives on every page." A seasoned pilot, as well as a poet and novelist, Axinn revels as much in viewing the world from above as he lovingly, though often wryly, surveys the scene around him here below. Whether in his charming love poems, his delight in the evolving seasons, or his search to understand people and places - and indeed himself - Axinn offers a fresh look at the world through the eyes of a constantly questing, and questioning, poet. "Here is a man," writes Parini, "who has looked at the world from many angles . . . with a sense of gathering wisdom."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateFeb 21, 2012
    ISBN9781611455625
    Travel in My Borrowed Lives: New and Selected Poems

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      Book preview

      Travel in My Borrowed Lives - Donald Everett Axinn

      INTRODUCTION

      Poetry is a language adequate to experience, and the range of a poet’s career will vary with the range of experience that he or she faces, directly or indirectly. Donald Everett Axinn has been writing poems for nearly half a century, and he has faced up to many things. This volume of new and selected poems is a testament to his steady and evolving vision, his ability to record what he has seen. Travel in My Borrowed Lives brings together a wide selection of his best work, drawn from different places in his writing life. But the stamp of individuality—the personal voice of the poet—lives on every page. Axinn shows an admirable consistency in his very human concerns: his love of nature, his affection for family and friends, his wish to explore regions of mind as well as regions of sky.

      Axinn is a businessman and pilot as well as a poet and novelist, and has pushed himself to the limit in these different fields. In the title poem of an early book, The Hawk’s Dream he sounds a deeply personal note:

      I am

      spawned by

      sun and wind;

      each night

      when day sleeps,

      I dream

      of a white hawk

      who

      dreams of me.

      He is, of course, himself the white hawk, taking a wide view of the world. This is a book of explorations and aerial surveys, and readers will find a wide variety of settings and occasions. There are love poems here, as in the beautiful First Love, and poems that express the ineffable love we feel for children, as in Rachel, one of the most delicate of lyrics in this collection. Death of the Son is a fierce and compelling poem about making peace with one’s father—a subject which Axinn returns to inexorably as he tries to come to terms with the strong father who played such a vivid role in his life. Indeed, Axinn examines the many angles of this life, its origins (in Eastern Europe) and trajectory, in many of these poems, such as Signs and Signals where he writes, I descend from a line that courses from one generation / To the next These angles create shapes and forms on the page, as a life begins to fall into places in the lines of poetry.

      Quite often, Axinn contemplates the universe in large terms, always with a note of wry self-scrutiny, a sense of pervasive doubt: I do not know if anything exists / past the last galaxy, he writes in Impossible Tasks. In each of these poems, he hopes to describe elementary parts of the world as he writes in Siblings This is a bold venture, and one that holds our attention.

      As a pilot-poet (a version of the white hawk), Axinn surveys the scene below and around him. He delights in nature, as poets have always done from the time of Chaucer. I always admire Axinn's fresh, concrete sense of the world, as in The Seasons, Northern Hemisphere where he writes about the ground in winter, topped with cool gentle snow, or the ground in spring’s sassy days, or in summer, When time fills up its flushed cup to brimming In a lovely poem called Summer Morning he notes how the fog imitates the mist and the mist the fog. If s a playful poem, in which the sun becomes "that sly old

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