Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems, 1994-2001

by John Peck

Overview

The poems in Red Strawberry Leaf speak in a voice unique in American letters, moving effortlessly beyond arbitrary city limits and national borders, transcending trends, continents, and eras to connect individual states of mind to the whole of Western culture. Written over seven years, Red Strawberry Leaf meditates on the spirit's engagement with the world in an allusive, personal style, in which neither the personal nor the tribal holds pride of place. Scattered touches of apocalypse and dark collective inventories serve only to highlight moments of burnished, lyric brilliance. These challenging poems will reward readers many times over.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226652948
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/01/2005
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

John Peck is a freelance editor and translator and a practicing Jungian analyst. He is the author of eight books of poems, most recently of Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems, 1994-2001, published in the Phoenix Poets series by the University of Chicago Press, and a cotranslator of C. G. Jung’s The Red Book.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
I
July
Barn Doorway in July
Inhaling the Pequot Dynasties
The Bench at Fontainebleau
Medley of the Cut
A Twenty-fourth Poem about Horses
Thucydides 
II
The Granite Steps at Sunrise
Three Tongues
Pines and Hemlocks
Heaven after Moving House
Anangke
Letter to Hermann Broch, December 2001
A Metal Denser than, and Liquid
Barges at Koblenz, 1986
At the Atom Plant near Vernon, Vermont
Transmission Lines
Single Wing
III
Conus Marmoreus, Night Piece, Rembrandt
San Andrean One
San Andrean Two
IV
Carnival, Luzern, 1984
Inkbrush Strophe and Antistrophe for Juditha, 2000
Porter of the Oar
Max Beckmann
Little Ode on Wheat
Eclogue
Little Testimony at Fruitlands, Massachusetts
Rhyming with Davie's Sonnet in Mandelshtam's Hope for the Best
A Stock-Taking:
Inventoriable
Walter Benjamin's Hope for the Best
Unfinished Announcement
Adventus
Passage
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Sometimes it seems like Peck is equipped with a pair of X-Ray Spex devised by a mad-scientist version of some synoptic historian of the West, a Victor Frankenstien crossed with a Hegel or an Arnold Toynbee. Whatever he looks at, he sees past the surface and into its historical and cultural context."

Pleiades - Robert Archambeau

"Sometimes it seems like Peck is equipped with a pair of X-Ray Spex devised by a mad-scientist version of some synoptic historian of the West, a Victor Frankenstien crossed with a Hegel or an Arnold Toynbee. Whatever he looks at, he sees past the surface and into its historical and cultural context."

— Robert Archambeau

Pleiades