Smartish Pace

Description

Adults are inclined to the illusion that all children love clowns and masks and life-sized puppets, but the unknown being inside a funny fuzzy bear costume can sometimes reduce a bemused infant to tears. In Alex Grant's new work, The Circus Poems, he picks up the theme of Fear of Moving Water and goes on to describe anthropoidal existence in a bewildering universe where even symmetry and order are random. He stresses the fragilility of living forms while showing their tenacious commitment to a beating pulse. We go hurtling through constellations at the mercy of sheer momentum until, worn down to dust, we disappear through a pinprick of light that is birth. Thus the cycle begins again. Of the Human Cannonball, he says: "He dreams the same dream night after night – he is shooting down a narrowing opening towards a pinprick of light – he hears the muffled voices, clanging metal, the ... [ read more ] “Grace,” one of the first poems in the collection, is a poem of praise. Here the speaker praises ‘my plain young mother for leaving/her husband’s bed/…’ ‘the caked galoshes drying beside/the basement door…’ ‘the steadfast ladderback chair…’ ‘the measure [my mother] counted aloud…/her calloused and lovely fingerpads…’ The etymological origins of praise speak to the source of Mayweed. From the Old French preisier ‘to praise, value,’ praise is also associated with the Latin pretiare or price. Lindsay’s ability to praise comes at the price of suffering, in this case the dying and death of a difficult, abusive father; the dying and death of a beloved sister and companion in music. Structured in three parts, the title poem that precedes Part One, speaks to her poet/subject’s responsibility at this time: Rise now from the kneeling in front of your east-facing window lamenting your sins aloud [ read more ]

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