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    Signs Following
    Signs Following
    Signs Following
    Ebook81 pages30 minutes

    Signs Following

    By Ger Killeen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Signs Following explores how the language of poetry can engage with history, temporality, and the fact of embodiment in the physical world of change and difference, while yearning for some transcendent guarantee of meaning.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParlor Press, LLC
    Release dateOct 20, 2005
    ISBN9781602357846
    Signs Following
    Author

    Ger Killeen

    Ger Killeen teaches in the Department of English and Writing at Marylhurst University near Portland, Oregon. His special interests are postmodern poetry, Celtic literature, the poetry of mysticism, and critical theory. He is the author of several books, including A Stone That Will Leap Over The Waves (Trask House, 1999), A Wren (Bluestem Press, winner of the Bluestem Award for Poetry), and Signs Following (Parlor Press, 2005). His work also appears in several anthologies, including From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), and The Gertrude Stein Awards 2006 (Green Integer).

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      Book preview

      Signs Following - Ger Killeen

      Acknowledgments

      I would like to thank the editors of the following periodicals and anthologies in which versions of some of these poems have appeared: American Poetry Review, Cyphers (Dublin), Hubbub, Fireweed, Portland Magazine, M Review, Calapooya Collage, Continental Drift, The Oregonian, From Here We Speak (OSU Press), On The Counterscarp (Salmon Publishing).

      During the writing of this book my life and work as a writer has been immeasurably enriched by friendship and intellectual engagement with many people—Ken McCormack and Carol Saunders, The Casbah Artists, Carlos Reyes, Gabriele Hayden, Carolyn Mitchell, Duane Poncy, Patricia McLean, Sandra Landers, Will Bohnaker, Kathleen Ellyn, Annie Callan, Saba Hussain, Eileen Mejia, Ron Tatum, Paulette Switzer, Ron Lovell, Tom McNamara, Brian Doyle, Martha Gies, Sally-Ann Stevens, Ray Touchstone, Ciarán O’ Driscoll, Noel Bourke, John Ryan, Máire Kerrane, John Eustace and many others. My students at Marylhurst and Linfield have been a special inspiration, particularly Nancy Garvin, Amy Sunderland, Sophia Farrier, Tina Carlone-Wood, Marianne Klekacz, Willow Teegarden, Troy May, Christine Linscott and Lynn Palmer.

      Jon Thompson’s editorial eye has been nothing short of brilliant.

      My thanks to all of you.

      I New Earth

      Ferns in Snow

      At the cracked mouth of the alder wood

      the field has lain down,

      stretched out under the snow’s rumpled sheet.

      The tented fern-clumps are erect,

      breasting the numb air.

      The wind moans its lack of a body:

      oh, it says, oh, when it wants to say

      Bearsfoot, Hartstongue, I have known you

      forever, Floating, Resurrection,

      I am mad with your names.

      The wood’s bones rattle and grind.

                                Afterwards the silence is absolute.

      Lemon Balm

      Unlike public history, the history of private life proposes

      something of order, if only the durability of our senses.

      In light of the world it is always before dark and after

      dark, and the colorless lung of time is always heaving its

      fevers and chills outwards in no very predictable way.

      Fevers and chills. Corrosive airs. They catch in the

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