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HURRY BACK
poems by Alvin Greenberg
Poetry ISBN 0-9717265-9-0 $16.00
US $25.00 CANADA 6 x 9 80
pp pub date: May 2005
Independent Publisher Book Awards Semi-Finalist in Poetry
details here
Local writer wins Idaho Prize
details here
Here are Alvin Greenberg’s poems of experience,
his grown man’s tribute to negative capability. He knows we live
in a world of indeterminacy, with our various ignorances and failures
of language. Yet without prettying-up these conditions, his Hurry
Back offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed paean to them, a kind
of “elegiac lean-to/set right out in the weather because the weather’s/what
there is and where we do our loving.” Though such sagacity pervades
this book, these are not poems of resignation. Greenberg knows the
birds on the highway “almost always” fly up in time, but he’s not
going to let that “almost” stop him from driving a little over the
speed limit.
—Stephen Dunn
Like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” the poems in Hurry Back
comprise a multi-dimensional meditation. The poet builds “a kind
of elegiac lean-to” within which readers dwell, while he explores
“history/ with its cords of bodies stacked behind the house.” He
conjures the Ohio of his boyhood during WWII and “the camps, the
camps that no one quite believed in.” Stripped of conventional capitalization,
Greenberg’s sentences disrupt expectations, as “the heavy plates
of the past/ slide up over the present.” A love for the quotidian
and a refreshing humor undergird these original, wise lyrics.
—Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair
Alvin Greenberg is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and librettist.
His new novel, Time Lapse, was published in 2003 by Tupelo
Press, and The University of Utah Press published his collection
of personal essays, The Dog of Memory: A Family Album of Secrets
and Silences, in 2002. His most recent collection of short
stories, How the Dead Live, appeared in 1998 from Graywolf
Press; previous collections include The Man in the Cardboard
Mask (Coffee House Press), Delta q (University of
Missouri Press), and The Discovery of America (Louisiana
State University Press). His collections of poetry include Why
We Live with Animals (Coffee House Press), Heavy Wings
(Ohio Review Press), and In/Direction (David R. Godine).
He has also collaborated on three operas with composer Eric Stokes,
most recently Apollonia’s Circus (premiered at the University
of Minnesota, 1994). After teaching for thirty four years in the
Macalester College English Department in St. Paul, Minnesota, he
now lives in Boise, Idaho, where his wife, poet Janet Holmes, teaches
in the MFA program at Boise State University.
near death
—for Juanita Garciagodoy
in the old woman’s dream the dog
she hadn’t fed, wouldn’t let in the house,
refused to help her cross the last river.
“fuck off, old woman,” he barked,
“i don’t owe you
anything”—and wagged his tail
and walked away like a shopkeeper
who sees you can’t afford his goods.
“please,” she called after him,
her fingers going brittle as frost,
“i can’t cross without you,
i’ll be stuck on this shore forever
among these raggedy animas en peña.”
the arch in his back as he strolled off
said “not my problem,” and she couldn’t,
really, argue with that,
though maybe, she thought, she didn’t
have to make this crossing now
and as long as she could still smell
the beans and tortillas frying
she could find her way back home
and ponder this business of dogs awhile.
and maybe when she had it all figured out
and knew enough to accidentally knock
some scraps off the kitchen counter
she could even get a little better
at this dying.
but it would take years
and many, many dogs.
© 2005 Alvin Greenberg
hurry back
it’s hard work, friends, trying to stitch this raggedy earth
into a wearable shirt. by the time i get it to fit
it’ll only be fit
to bury me in. ok, but i’d like someone to admire
my handiwork
a day or so before then, even with a lie. just say
it
looks good on me. i know one sleeve’s longer than the other,
so
what? it still holds me together, which is all i ever asked of clothes.
and it’s mine, wearable and wearing, nothing fashionable or clever,
only what i’ve needled my fingers with, worked for, chose.
so who’ll tell me now it’s time to rest awhile? no more of that
‘let us go then, you and i. . . .’ i’d like to just sit here
a bit,
a weary fan, applauding the polluted skies for the gorgeous sunset,
remembering how at izzy’s they used to rush you through your
corned beef, half a dozen people waiting for your seat and then
izzy
himself crying ‘hurry back’ while he made the register ring.
they want too much of you and all at once, which is why we have
this zany
passion for the boundlessness of baseball, where no inning
ever has to end or be the last. imagine a game that goes on forever
at its own pace, forever slowing as the players age, a tailor
in
the dugout stitching up the tattered uniforms, reliever
on the mound,
batter at the plate, forever panting and forever . . .
but what do i know? convenience stores are hemming in my neighborhood,
places with names like kwik stop and hurry back that instruct
you
to leave your motor running en route to the good
life. but if a
quick quart of two percent’s what truth’s come to, we’re fucked,
friends, and might as well just grab the first shabby chemise
that
slides off the rack and find our places in that old procession
of
animals and people shuffling dumbly along to the sacrifice,
the
steady, dependable multitude: their knowledge, their desolation.
© 2005 Alvin Greenberg
The Independent Publisher Book Awards were
conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of
the independent publishing industry. The awards are intended to bring increased
recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent and university titles produced
each year, and reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity
to bring about change in the world of publishing.
The "IPPY" Awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers. Established as the first awards program open exclusively to independents, over 1,000 "IPPYs" have been awarded to authors and publishers around the world. The tenth annual, 2006 Awards will recognize Ten Outstanding Books of the Year in categories such as Most Inspirational to Youth and Most Likely To Save the Planet, and to a winner and two finalists in 60 different categories, ranging from non-fiction categories like Architecture and Religion, to fiction categories like Multicultural and Horror. New this year, special Regional Awards in eight U.S. and two Canadian regions will be included, for Best Fiction and Best Non-Fiction Book in each region.
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