Description
Book SynopsisIn this collection, E. Alex Pierce enters the territory of memory embedded in landscape where “language tied to the land” evokes the cadence of tidal rivers and creates a fluid world. She traces the fragmented childhood beginnings that lead to the formation of a young artist who moves from music, through theatre, to poetry. The passionate relationships and complex juxtapositions of art and performance that form an artist’s life find voice here in the symphonic structure of the long poem, the provocative individual prose poems, and the final stretched sonnet sequence that interrogates a lost love, “Still. Shimmering in the morning wind. And gone.” These fiercely poised works are layered and rich, with sensuous attention to line and breath: a major work from an accomplished poet. And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. She sees the fire – space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame. She sees it burning all the way back to the Sable River, the lamp, the voices, the two old people, in the dark, without wall or roof or post or beam – and even as her father buries refuse in the cellar hole, turns all this under, she seizes it, picks up her torch, and runs. —from the title poem
Trade Review“Pierce creates movements in the rhythm of the estuary of Sable River, where she grew up, opening, closing up, floating and drowning as consistently as moon directs the tides…. Hers is a poetry of attentiveness, reaching back through the years and into the future without sentimentality…” [Full review at https://freefallmagazine.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/review-of-e-alex-pierces-to-float-to-drown-to-close-up-to-open/] -- Joan Shillington * Freefall Magazine *
Table of ContentsTo float, to drown, to close up, to open – a throat 3 To float, to drown… 19 Full Moon 22 The boy. The boy is her beloved. 23 Medway River, Carousel 25 Nothing more lonely 26 The Creek MĪthan, to conceal 31 A Dug Well 32 Tempest 33 The sky full of empty rooms 35 Bach Prelude: Reprise 36 Mīthan 37 Not wanting it to end 39 The fetch of the wind 40 It is in me forever 41 Vindauga The Stanzas. Rooms. 44 You want to say the word chemise 47 It could have been that morning 48 The opening, the newness, as if it were now 49 In an afternoon, at your house 50 Not of you. Of the capturing 51 Now, on YouTube, the camera 52 Heat from the photo lamps 53 Enraptured. Christmas morning at your house 54 The two Polish chairs 55 I can still see you, us. Side by side at Logan Airport 56 Every Sunday morning we would set off 57 Something about the dark 58 What were they doing 59 Honey and locusts. A man in pain 60 In this last hour 61 The vulnerability that doesn’t show 62 Should I tell you now 63 Or have we lived it 64 It’s not the heart. It’s the cry 65 Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo 66 We’ve come so far 67 The boards are bare Coda, Aubade. 71 The way white lilacs 73 Notes 83 Acknowledgements
