What do you think?
Rate this book
Afterwords
AFTERWORDS, Leon Weinmann’s debut poetry collection, investigates the power—and powerlessness—of the lyric to respond to time and loss. In a fallen, hyperconscious world in which “the echo follows what it should precede,” in which words arrive too late, as mere addenda to experience, how can language, and poetry specifically, create our necessary “small round world, held out to hold/ a place for everything that’s lost”? Weinmann’s poems, ranging from traditional sonnets and blank verse to more radically experimental forms, push language beyond consolation and praise and toward a possibility of atonement with the world of things.
86 pages, Paperback
First published March 7, 2014
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 14, 2018
We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
THEOGONY
First they raped him, then they made him sing.
Before was neither
paradise nor the idea
of paradise, and time
was distant, groaning on the deep.
He couldn’t have told us then: nothing
happened, nothing stopped
happening—above, the sun, still putting out
the eyes of the white sea-cliffs; the sea,
still sucking at the garbled shore.
Lightheaded, shepherd Hesiod,
driving once again up Helicon his flock,
the rich, pellucid wool,
glancing white, red, bright
freshet of blood and sperm,
might have worked it into tune,
quickening leaves, clacking
tusks in the panicked brush,
thunder shaking the olives down,
but he had no sense of time.
And then the Muses
taught him song, twisted
him into their belly, sack
to empty, fill with truth,
with falsehood, as they wished.
The zero hour, noon, and no one
near, just tree limbs knocking out
a meter in the middle of the air, and time
wrapped itself in ribbons of wool
around the olive branch they made him hold.
He spread his mouth, the gods came in and out,
he choked on swansdown, bryony, blood
of the god, sea-foam
of heartless Aphrodite, hot
bronze of the new-forged shield
burning his swollen lips.
Tasting all these things,
he spit them out in song,
and they were gone.
Time remained. Passed.
He wiped his bloody mouth.
Already, over the sea,
new things were happening,
the Scamander clotting,
fire billowing below decks, in the dead lungs.
Already other songs were being sung.
Already men wanted something back.
AFTER VISITING HOURS
All unnecessary weight is eliminated....
Even the brain cells needed for song are lost
and replaced seasonally in some birds.
–All the Birds of North America, p. 63
At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this thoughtless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and, trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.
THEOGONY
First they raped him, then they made him sing.
Before was neither
paradise nor the idea
of paradise, and time
was distant, groaning on the deep.
He couldn’t have told us then: nothing
happened, nothing stopped
happening—above, the sun, still putting out
the eyes of the white sea-cliffs; the sea,
still sucking at the garbled shore.
Lightheaded, shepherd Hesiod,
driving once again up Helicon his flock,
the rich, pellucid wool,
glancing white, red, bright
freshet of blood and sperm,
might have worked it into tune,
quickening leaves, clacking
tusks in the panicked brush,
thunder shaking the olives down,
but he had no sense of time.
And then the Muses
taught him song, twisted
him into their belly, sack
to empty, fill with truth,
with falsehood, as they wished.
The zero hour, noon, and no one
near, just tree limbs knocking out
a meter in the middle of the air, and time
wrapped itself in ribbons of wool
around the olive branch they made him hold.
He spread his mouth, the gods came in and out,
he choked on swansdown, bryony, blood
of the god, sea-foam
of heartless Aphrodite, hot
bronze of the new-forged shield
burning his swollen lips.
Tasting all these things,
he spit them out in song,
and they were gone.
Time remained. Passed.
He wiped his bloody mouth.
Already, over the sea,
new things were happening,
the Scamander clotting,
fire billowing below decks, in the dead lungs.
Already other songs were being sung.
Already men wanted something back.
AFTER VISITING HOURS
All unnecessary weight is eliminated....
Even the brain cells needed for song are lost
and replaced seasonally in some birds.
–All the Birds of North America, p. 63
At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this thoughtless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and, trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.
May 17, 2015
Beautiful poems. The theme of transformation runs through them all, sometimes more subtly than others, but always there. He has a terrific control of form and sound, and a sense of literary history that shapes some of the form and content of his poems.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews