Poet's Tomb, The
The Material Soul of Poetry
Martin Corless-Smith
- 105 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Poet's Tomb, The
The Material Soul of Poetry
Martin Corless-Smith
About This Book
Every poem an epitaph, every poem a ticket to ride, from Sappho's "bittersweet" eroticism to the "wild civility" of Robert Herrick. Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, painter, and translator of canonical poems, and each of these vocations is on view in this memorable defense of poetry as he reads from Virgil to Notley in sight of the impossible blue of Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredan and Piranesi's otherworldly Pyramid of Cestius while contemplating the paradoxes of the finite body of the poet dreaming immortal poetry. âKeith TumaQuerying the embodiment of poetry, Corless-Smith begins in the body of the poetâliving and/or deadâand passes from there through the body of the reader in order to argue the mutual construction of the body of a poem as a shared body and a new commons, which, like all things vital to survivalâair, water, hopeâmust be maintained as open and available to all. These succinct, elegant essays perform this maintenance and, in the process, return us to all poetry charged with the energy and insight necessary to continue that maintenance ourselves. âCole Swensen