Reservations

Poems

James Richardson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691616605, 9780691063294
• eBook ISBN: 9781400870851
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The poems are elegies for everything, including myself," writes James Richardson. "Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its surroundings, threatened by their (and its own) continuous vanishing. The poems respond with a helplessness, fitful control, and not a little tenderness. Like the protagonists of The Encyclopedia of Stones: A Pastoral, I am very slow, both unsettled and inspired by the vertiginous strangeness and speed of events. I suspect these melancholy and disembodied poems are attempts to arrest the moment long enough to say farewell, to let things go rather than be subject to their disappearance."

Originally published in 1977.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• In Touch
• The Tracks
• Elegy for a Cousin
• Writing to You After Sunset
• The Vanished
• A Season of Farewell
• Lepidoptera
• Settlements
• The Encyclopedia of the Stones: A Pastoral
• The Morning After
• For Deucalion and Pyrrha
• The Dead
• Homing
• For October
• Set
• Elegy for the Left Hand
• Instructions for a Commando
• Plowing Under
• A Coast
• A Few Things for the End
• The Lake
• A Ransom Note
• An End of Ends
• Somebody Else
• Sieges
• The Crime
• Elegy for a Deaf Mute
• Southern Railway Embankment, Charlottesville, Va.
• In the Museum of the River
• Moving In
• The Operations
• Ashes
• The Condemned
• Close
• The Family of Ties
• Returns
• Driver Education
• Elegy for Ninety-Two and Two
• The Will
• Nine Thousand Days
• Elegy for One Who Never Lived
• A Little Answer
• On the Anniversary of Your Death
• Going North for the Winter
• Coda for October
• The Abandoned Tracks
• An Age