Here Both Sweeter

Daniel Carter

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781606351574
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776866
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Daniel Carter's Here Both Sweeter is a book in which you "have a seedling in each pocket," a "body bodies," and words are something you "carve out" so as to make a home. The poems are stories, are seeds, are secret messages cast and sent across the natural world to a reader, where they blossom in the imagination. The plot is "scatter-wild," the lyrics "all willful and fallow." Carter's language serves as a garden, rich and strange, full of acorns and ink and ash, and in it the green world (of nature, of the heart and body, of words and ideas) is overturned, recycled, and remade.

SEEING AS

You know I was born—
too gone to realize

-

Catch me on the crossroads—loaded
down with dice—

you’re just a lost boy

-

Tell me, fallen moon—
how the Devil got into you—

how he hollowed

-

Let it do, that broken plane—
and I do,

and I do.

-

Take, take away
the bramble path—

I write it a letter.
I hope you’re there.

-

Call me on a corner
phone—slow and simple,

call me home—I’ll carve out
your words and make

them my home.

-

I’ll be the shallow, if you’ll be
the deep—and if it pulls

-

Fall down on it—if he calls you

down on it—and lift up

-

And my body
bodies against—what

held

-

Oh, noise—I am gone missing

-

Find me outside
my trunk of cedar,

and it will make you
see—the dove my cuff

-

Take down, take down

I WANT TO LIVE BOTH / IN

Unclasped one hand

knowing I might not

find what home

held—my body

strange and outside

and unable to build—

what isn’t gray

gives way to lines

and edges of what

I’ve never seen—

a barn, blue bird,

pink lake, aspic,

white—last night

I said give me a sign;

pull it over the hill.

A storm means taking

itself somewhere else

and I think for always;

...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Here Both Sweeter
• Mere Spark and Echo
• Went with Letters
• Barley-Bees, Barlow or
• Ghost [House]
• Best and Most Numerous
• Sky Filled
• Seeing As
• I Want to Live Both/In
• Loves More the Cherry
• Ghost [Earth]
• Life Better With