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THE CLOUDS OF LUCCA

THE CLOUDS OF LUCCA

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9911465-7-4

Pub Date: Sept. 2014

Pages: 108


By D.S. Butterworth


In The Clouds of Lucca, encounters with diverse cultures and the unknown lay bare the tension and beauty of human experience by mapping out the range of feeling and understanding of which we are capable. Driven by lyrical voice and attention to the kaleidoscopic particulars, these poems trace the imagination’s imprinting of meaning on the given world. This book explores the interplay of mind and world, of self and society, and of past and present through the lenses of travel, cultural artifact, and the crises forged by our achievement of understanding and our persistent blindness. The Clouds of Lucca crafts an appreciation for the beauty of culture’s broken wonders within an awareness that it is futile to resist change within the weather of time.

    The Smaller Cup

    We know things by their absence, warmth

    by absence, love. We understand openings


    by closing them, as with your eyes smoothing

    the distances. We remember by shuttling images


    along a wick, the machine of stars running

    blood along a finger’s touch. We measure


    fullness by a bowl’s brimming, time by

    dust gathering on the face of a watch,


    distance by how helpless words become.

    And then it’s as if the world sheds its clothing


    and it is no longer October or November,

    just some remote cast off planet turning


    its engine over and over in some corner

    of particularity where we find ourselves


    at the end of something

    as cold spills through the window

    into a small bright cup.


    -D.S. Butterworth


    © Copyright 2014 by D.S. Butterworth


    D. S. Butterworth grew up in Seattle and attended Western Washington University in Bellingham. He earned an M.A. and PhD in English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout these years he pulled graveyard shift in a cannery, unloaded fishing boats, worked crab lines, taught at a school for dyslexic children, and spent a summer on a fire lookout tower in the Cascade Mountains. He taught as a lecturer at Chapel Hill and spent four years teaching at Morehead State University in eastern Kentucky. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He has taught in Study Abroad programs in Zambia and Italy where he was a regular contributor to The Florence Newspaper. In 1992, Algonquin Books published his creative non-fiction book, Waiting for Rain: A Farmer’s Story. His poetry and fiction have appeared in magazines including Arcadia, The Baltimore Review, Cascadia Review, The Copperfield Review, Cream City Review, The Wisconsin Review, Amoskeag, The Louisville Review, The Portland Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Santa Clara Review, The Midwest Quarterly Review, Rock and Sling, and Willow Springs. Lost Horse Press published his poetry book, The Radium Watch Dial Painters, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards.

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