Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Tavern recommends Sancta

Tavern friend Andrew Grace has just published his third full-length collection, Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012), and is it spectacular! This book-length collection offers up a lyrically powerful and dense meditation on self and place. Grace, whose other books include A Belonging Field (Salt) and Shadeland (Ohio State University Press), has a style and lyrical range that few can match.

Here's the first piece (all the poems in Sancta are untitled prose poems):

Grief is the never ender in the raucous pond reeds. Ursa Minor sets out its silver lice in the cypress. Take one season and turn through it like these fruit bats, following sent-back abyss-ticks, here, and further out, here...I wanted this to be an epigraph. I wanted to rain for forty days. I wanted a trigger. I have a lake with a crown of bats. I have intransience. Salt away.

Happy reading!