Litanies Near Water: Poems

by Paula Closson Buck

Infused with Mediterranean landscapes, the poems of Litanies Near Water, Paula Closson Buck's second collection, probe the world through language that acts sometimes like a divining rod and sometimes like a lightning rod. Elegant meditative lyrics such as "You Cannot Love the Wind" and "Theory of an Impersonal God" answer to politically alert poems like "Monk Killed by Tractor in Bid to Dodge Police." Ultimately, in Buck's deft hand, the lyrical quest for understanding becomes a form of diplomacy between the physical and the metaphysical, between instances of beauty and the violence that threatens daily.From "Last Days"The waiter unbuttonshis white shirt briskly,pulls until it billowsand the tails fly free,then wipes the tables clean.I am driving the mountain roadbehind a farmer's pickup.One cow rides supine in the back;from the two who straddle her,thrown on the curves, a rearleg splays out over the bed.I lay on the horn, follow at a distance.I weep, I linger these last days,knowing what I know.On a jag of sadnessfor things that happen onceor not at all, or that never should,I am eating with the lights off,the crush of jasmineso sweet I can't think straight.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Paula Closson Buck is the author of two books of poems, The Acquiescent Villa (1998) and Litanies Near Water (2008), both from Louisiana State University Press. Her first novel, Summer on the Cold War Planet, is just out from Fomite, and short stories drawing on her travels in India have appeared recently in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review. She has been awarded three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist grants and a Fulbright fellowship to Cyprus, where she worked collaboratively in poetry with two Cypriot visual artists. A former editor of the literary magazine West Branch, she directs the creative writing program at Bucknell University. She is currently at work on a third book of poems and a new novel set in Venice.