Kirjahaku

In the manner of a poetic meditation, Square Inch Hours draws on elements from fiction, memoir, daybook, and reverie, piecing together moments that follow in the aftermath of a breakdown. Writing from an area outside psychology or personal history, the intensely solitary speaker relates the experience of reengaging with the world. With an adamant attentiveness, he turns his focus to observing reality in its minutest particulars: the expression on the face of a random passerby; the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. How he perceives is how he reconnects. The title, Square Inch Hours, expresses that impulse to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph.

In a style that ranges through narrative, commentary, vignette, and verse, this is a sustained meditation on the nature and origins of erotic love. Sherod Santos, author of two previous volumes of verse, Accidental Weather and The Southern Reaches, explores the tumult of the inner life as he masterfully uncovers the world and underworld of those ever-shifting relations between a man and a woman.

The centerpiece of this collection, "Elegy for My Sister," is a sequence of poems on the suicide of the poet's sister in which he gathers, piece by piece, the scattered fragments of his sister's life. In other poems, Santos follows this elegiac theme into the broader contexts of myth and contemporary history to explore the ways each private loss is overlaid by those harrowing conditions by which our century defines itself.

This collection's searing poems travel between the frozen moment of personal time and the inexorable sweep of history. The poet tracks genocide's record from Tamerlane to Pol Pot, an exiled tyrant's return to the killing fields, and Penelope's embracing her inevitable loss of Odysseus upon his return. In each poem, Santos tests the delicate balance between life and art.

Sherod Santos's new translation of classical poems answers Rosetti's mandate that "the only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation…with one more possession of beauty." Arranged into four periods—Classical, Hellenic, Roman, and Early Byzantine—Greek Lyric Poetry features works by such ancient masters as Xenophanes, Callimachus, Sappho, and Simonides. For the general reader as well as for poets and lovers of poetry, the translations celebrate the marvelous slips and illuminating reconfigurations that occur when a poet in the present communes with poets in the past.

“Sherod Santos is a contemporary master of the lyric poem. In The Intricated Soul, we witness the astonishing effects of his powerful, restless poetic imagination. . . . Santos is a musician and a thinker, architect and bard, theorist and witness, and we are the lucky recipients of the singular, radiant gift of The Intricated Soul.”—David Baker

A poetic meditation, Square Inch Hours draws on elements from fiction, memoir, daybook and reverie, piecing together moments in the aftermath of a breakdown. With adamant attentiveness, the speaker turns his focus to reality in its minute particulars: the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. The title Square Inch Hours expresses his urge to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph. Through intense sensual perception, he begins to reconnect with the world.

In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them.In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man.These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment.With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.