For the Scribe

Description

For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of extinction and apocalypse figure prominently and obsessively in these pages, both in short lyrics and in several lengthy sequences. The poems also evidence the mastery of technique for which Wojahn is renowned, whether he is writing in fixed forms or in free verse. For the Scribe is the most ambitious and searching collection thus far from a poet who has been a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the William Carlos Williams Book Award. Contents i. My Father’s Soul Departing Extinction Event: A Cache of Photos of the Last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Extinction Event: Two-Minute Film of the Last Tasmanian Tiger Atahulpa Bivalve Briefe Historie of the Noose in the Colonie of Virginia Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You Canis Familiarus ii. Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry Absolute Rhythm For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 BC Nineteen Eleven Blues Extinction Event: Decoy Birds Study Skins Sinatra: The Concert at Pompeii, 1991 Body Politic: To Ezra Pound in Purgatory Anniversary Poem iii. Extinction Event: Catawba Cotton Mill, 1908 In the Attic Chalk Line Ichor Concerning Pan Extinction Event: The Book of Revelation as Interpreted by Link Wray Occupy Watching Fox News on the Holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Jefferson Composing His Bible Sclera Lorine Niedecker: The Only Recording, 1970 Ode to Fox P2 Notes Acknowledgments