After Image - Softcover

George, Jenny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596952 ISBN 13: 9781556596957

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2024

Synopsis

Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Image travels between life and death, between a living body and its absence.

A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms." A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George's After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—" Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet's persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief's terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George's sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.

About this title

About the Author

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TIN BUCKET

The world is not simple.

Anyone will tell you.

But have you ever washed a person's hair

over a tin bucket,

gently twisting the rope of it

to wring the water out?

At the end of everything,

dancers just use air as their material.

A voice keeps singing even

without an instrument.

You make your fingers into a comb.

ORPHEUS ASCENDING

A crack appeared.

Beyond it, snow was pouring through the spring sunlight.

A bright, dry snow

like particles of unearthly metal.

I emerged.

And the earth closed after me, keeping her inside,

the way an instrument case

will seal shut around its black music.

Or was I the instrument?

Or was it not music, but pain

singing from the depths?

( )

Aboveground

the peonies were smothered

in snow, bent beyond their weight with ice-white.

The bare-root apple couldn't hold

and snapped. I kept looking back

to where the bed stood stripped

like a table.

( )

Then came the smack of snowmelt

off the eaves, the house weeping and shining

under fresh sun.

Every water bucket brimmed.

The garden—rinsed, dismantled—

breathed out a new green.

And with all the windows open, through the space

came the sound of—what were they?

Meadowlarks?

Days elapsed, years.

( )

I still live

in our little house by the orchard, sited so the setting sun

illuminates the garden,

the bubbling fountain

like a fountain of fire in the final moments

before night draws across its lid.

Then, absolute quiet.

Even the wind resting in the trees.

We on earth, how can we know

how long the silences will be

between the movements?

I wait for song

to grow in me across the dark interval.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596952
• ISBN 13: 9781556596957
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96