Your Death Full of Flowers

by Wild Grace

A very special collection of poems is being released into the world, like sun-bright bees zigging off to their meadows—Your Death Full of Flowers.

Slippery Elm is editor, and he has done loving translations of each poem between English and Spanish. He and his compadres have seen the project through from idea to fruition, in each detail choosing not what is easiest, or least expensive, or quickest, but what they determined to be best, and I am eagerly awaiting my package of books. For I am one of twenty-one writers whose work is contained (oh, lucky me) in these artisanal works, each "[p]rinted and bound by a family of artesanal leather workers from Ubrique, Andalusia, Spain."

Here is what Slippery Elm says about the book on the website:

Your Death Full of Flowers

A bouquet of poems arranged and translated by Slippery Elm

The thread that ties this bouquet together is that of the story of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogion. A woman composed of flowers, who sought to kill her husband, and was thereby transformed into an owl. Blodeuwedd meaning flower-face, and the owl said to have been called blodeuwedd in the Welsh of yore. 

Just as the wizard Gwydion gathered blossoms of broom, meadowsweet, and trefoil, the editor gathers the poems to conjure something greater, a something that then goes on to wing the poetry out into the world. A deadly and nefarious agenda in the eyes of the princes of our age, or of those who are their followers and find no love or meaning but in their expendable busts. 

In the garden of these pages we encounter the whimsy and abandon of the eccentric who goes through life, toothless and in colourful rags, giving out flowers just because. Who heard the patter of Death’s slippers by their nightstand and received him with a bouquet. Who throws flowers at grooms and graves, and awoke suddenly as the rose’s final petal fell. We encounter the lyric and litany, the poison, the perfume, the lament, the laughter, and the eschatological love poem. The flowers that open above us. 

Flowers have been plucked from a well pick’d troop of poets, poets of the other breath, of the diverse brushstroke and the obscure melody. Major figures in English, Spanish, Arabic, American, and Welsh literatures, as well as newly emerging voices. Poets both young and old, and poets dead as much as living. Poets who have proven themselves worthy of the appellation, not just through prizes, accolades or infamy but through a certain generosity of the spirit and a marked commitment to the Poetry. This almost spiritual pedigree, of wise innocence, of beatific inspiration, might be boiled down into two words, which in some ways, are each a reflection of the other. For the old: trust. For the young: bravery. 

All poems appear in English and Spanish, and one in Arabic. The two languages form a dialectic in which meaning is generated in the space between them. It is in this hermeneutic tension between the Yes and the No, at the interstice between the two different tongues, between the dead nettle and white archangel, right in the centre of the book, that the beginning of an answer is given to the riddle of all riddles. 

_________________________________________

This book is a fairy dart tipped with a draught to re-enchant a chantless world. That the lector remember his or her mortality and live all the more fully for it. Our aim is true. We swear by all flowers.

300 exemplars

Pocket hardback bound in three shades of green leather: holm oak, mugwort, and wild ivy; and in two shades of blue leather: bavarian gentian, and belladonna berry. Stamped in gold. Magenta and cerulean endpapers. Printed and bound by a family of artisanal leather workers from Ubrique, Andalusia, Spain. As the leather work is done by hand, no two copies are exactly alike. 

440 pages. 65 poems by 21 poets.

Contents

*

Elf Shot

Blooms Cast Upon a Tomb

Flowers of Flight

Flowers of God Making

‘Where the Bee Sucks there Suck I’

Women of Gardens and Gore

Your Final Roses

*

The poets:

Adler Frischauer

Antler

Casey June Wolf 

David ap Gwilym

Elena Botica

Emilio Montaño

Erynn Rowan Laurie

Giles Watson

Ian Kappos

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

MAAM (Maria de los Angeles Argote Molina)

Mahmoud Darwish

Mike Mahoney

Nicolas Ramajo Chiacchio

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus

Robert Graves

Ruby Sara

Scott Ramsay

Slippery Elm

Steven Posch

Tanya Fader

Victor Anderson

Your Death Full of Flowers can be ordered here: 

http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/your-death-full-of-flowers

“What He Thought" by Heather McHugh

What He Thought

by Heather McHugh

for Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the mayor, mulled

a couple matters over (what's

a cheap date, they asked us; what's

flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:

the academic, the apologist,

the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.

Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome

(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)

to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.

I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book

back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there

we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,

till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

                                             "What's poetry?"

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or

the statue there?" Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth

is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square

because of his offense against

authority, which is to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things

move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world." Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might

incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That's

how they burned him. That is how

he died: without a word, in front

of everyone.

                     And poetry—

                                        (we'd all

put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on

softly)—

                  poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Heather McHugh, "What He Thought", from Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 © 1994 by Heather McHugh. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Image: Photo by David Oliver (2006). Close-up of the statue of Giordano Bruno at the Campo de' Fiori, Rome. Photo heavily over-exposed. (The statue is dark.) Public domain through Wikimedia Commons.