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    Home Burial
    Home Burial
    Home Burial
    Ebook74 pages23 minutes

    Home Burial

    By Michael McGriff

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor."Third Coast

    "There is majestic beauty in these descriptions, and it is clear that McGriff honors this place as a placenot as mere setting, but as a distinct element of his verse."Gently Read Literature

    Michael McGriff's second full-length collection explores interior landscapes and illustrates life in a rural community in the Pacific Northwest. Whether tender or hard-hitting, McGriff juxtaposes natural images of deep forests, creeks, coyotes, and crows against the harsher oil-grease realities of blue-collar life, creating poems that read like folk tales about the people working in grain mills, forests, and factories.

    "New Civilian"

    The new law says you can abandon your child
    in an emergency room,
    no questions asked. The young father
    carries the sleeping boy
    through the hospital doors.
    Later, alone, parked at the boat basin,
    he takes a knife from his pocket,
    cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,
    lights the longer half in his mouth.
    He was a medic in the war.
    In his basement are five bronze eagles
    that once adorned the walls
    of a dictator's palace.

    Michael McGriff attended the University of Oregon; the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in creative writing; and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow. He is the co-founding editor and publisher of Tavern Books and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 18, 2012
    ISBN9781619320307
    Home Burial

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    • 4/5
      Michael McGriff's fine collection of seemingly autobiographical poems is well-worth spending some time with. Rich in common language and imagery, hand-wrought like the work he alludes to, and filled with imagery from nature and the land he obviously loves, there are times when the emotions seem oevrwrought---but they are rare. Surreal juxtapositions of imagery interrupt the more prosaic narratives to surreal and synaesthesiac effect.

      In all there is truth in these poems that try and fail to "explain the wounded alphabet/dragging itself through the groves of ash."

    Book preview

    Home Burial - Michael McGriff

    Kissing Hitler

    I’ve tried to keep the landscape

    buried in my chest, in its teak box,

    but tonight, awakened

    by the sound of my name

    strung between the trees,

    I see the box on my nightstand

    giving off the kind of light

    you never know you belong to

    until you see it dance

    from a pile of metal shavings

    or shaken loose

    from a sword fern’s root-wad.

    It’s the same light that trailed me

    the entire summer of my sixteenth year,

    driving County Road 64

    toward Power Line Ridge,

    the three radio towers

    blinking in the Oregon dark.

    Between each red pulse

    the dark hung its birthrights in front of me,

    a few dead branches

    crawling up from the ditch,

    a lost bolt of mooncloth

    snagged on a barbed-wire fence,

    shredding in the tide wind.

    The light my oldest friends

    slammed into their veins

    or offered to the night

    when they made amends.

    One of them,

    the tallest and toughest,

    the one who used to show up Saturdays

    for my mother’s breakfast—

    he could juggle five eggs

    and recite the alphabet backward—

    he told me as he covered my hand with his

    while I downshifted to enter the gravel quarry

    that he wanted to punch the baby

    out of Jessica’s stomach—

    he’s the one, tonight, whose carbide hands

    have opened the lid of this little box.

    I can see the two of us now, kissing Hitler.

    That’s what we called it—

    siphoning gas,

    huffing shop rags.

    And we kissed him everywhere,

    in other counties,

    with girls we barely knew

    telling us to hurry

    before someone called the

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