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    Lay Studies
    Lay Studies
    Lay Studies
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Lay Studies

    By Steven Toussaint

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    About this ebook

    In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage. Beneath their formal dexterity and variety, these études sustain a continuous meditation on the concords and dissonances of worshipful life in an age dominated by spectacle, violence, and environmental devastation. With great skill and compassion, he depicts scenes of domestic life in his adopted home of New Zealand, a transient year of religious and artistic soul-searching in the United Kingdom, and a growing sense of dislocation from his native United States in the Trump era. These are poems of profound contemplative inwardness, conjuring and conversing with a vast tradition of literature, scholarship, and art. Lay Studies is a powerful collection and a welcome music.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVictoria University Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2020
    ISBN9781776563296
    Lay Studies

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      Book preview

      Lay Studies - Steven Toussaint

      Acknowledgements

      THE NEW LAITY

      The final poem is praise, but this is the first

      transmission, an emergency test

      of audience participation in light of recent

      unforeseeable events.

      In a series of yes or no questions

      we will ask you to refresh

      your annual commitment . . .

      The radio rests

      but your neighbourhood remains

      a moment longer ringing, property

      outperforming silence, whose articulation

      and attack need practice

      to appreciate, hands immersed in soil

      up to your wedding

      band, to introduce to all below the things with which

      you feel. This is the seminal

      trespass, in which the slow eyes of the witness

      meet the quick eyes of the reader

      and for an instant the pattern is complete

      but not foreclosed.

      The earth tenders her apprentice.

      Listen to her knowledge

      age, the groaning of your neighbour’s second garage

      going up, the speculator’s

      only music. Wasn’t it fraternitas’s fruit you wanted

      cordoned off, gauging

      each depression with a fingernail, forcing

      every germ into the vacant

      columns you’d proportioned to goad the berries

      big? Or would you dig

      a single plot, and pour them in, because

      you find it beautiful

      that creatures couple up to live? The plant betrays

      no atom of a self save

      friable tilth, analogies for wealth you cannot speak so

      secrete away, now a skill

      you know by the way the patterns lace and purl who blew

      the glass you see them through.

      ACTS

      To begin again, the deepest palace must explode

      unnoticed. A slow release

      will always leave the one who authored you afraid.

      That was

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