Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions
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Maurice Manning; Foreword by W.S. Merwin
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This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.
From Seven Chimeras
The way Booth makes a love story:
same as a regular story, except
under one rock is a trapdoor that leads
to a room full of belly buttons;
each must be pushed, one is a landmine.
The way Booth makes hope:
thirty-seven acres, Black Damon,
Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire
in the Great Field and let it become
unquenchable.
The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade:
shoot the weasel in the neck
and toss it to the buzzards.
The way Booth thinks of salvation:
God holding a broken abacus,
colored beads falling away.
The way Booth makes a love story:
same as a regular story, except
under one rock is a trapdoor that leads
to a room full of belly buttons;
each must be pushed, one is a landmine.
The way Booth makes hope:
thirty-seven acres, Black Damon,
Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire
in the Great Field and let it become
unquenchable.
The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade:
shoot the weasel in the neck
and toss it to the buzzards.
The way Booth thinks of salvation:
God holding a broken abacus,
colored beads falling away.
Maurice Manning is a native of Danville, Kentucky. He holds degrees from Earlham College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA in 1999. He has held a writing fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently teaches English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.
"The Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious [of poetry contests]."—Library Journal
ISBN: 9780300089981
Publication Date: July 11, 2001
Publication Date: July 11, 2001
96 pages, 6 1/4 x 7 1/2
