The Green Lives [Paperback]

Its a month, a year. Wander, tramp, escape, trespass: people have every reason under the sunand no reason at all. In new syntax and a fitful sense of the poetic line, The Green Lives finds joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand. It opens in familiar signs (safehouse, railroad, dog) that are made strange in their service to warn or welcome. In its turn, a reversal of place emerges where no marker will be left: an example of yellow petals, a thousand miles of strip malls, air filling with dust, glitter, and sulfur. Ever receptive to beautiful intrusion, so fast, Gilmore reckons with the infinite.Sara Gilmores poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presses Second Factory and 6x6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived for seventeen years in Seville, Spain, and now lives in Iowa City with her young son. She has worked extensively on translating the work of Antonio Gamoneda. Gilmores intuitive, nearly prescient, voice reads as if it were a whisper or hymn. Through quiet permission and heather in the grammar, Gilmores debut work finds feelings in the abandon and serves as evidence of her wisdom and place as one of poetrys greats. In the old fable of the lyric, the poet steps away from the fire circle, the mass, the crowdsteps away, for a moment, from the worldto receive a message about reality. A message which the poet must assiduously write down, as clearly as they can; must run back, sweating or composed, and deliver to inhospitable us. This is the fable and work of the poem. It has nothing to do with a career. It is about the way, see, we are alive. Sara Gilmores The Green Lives is a very new and powerful flashing up of this oldest lyric labor. Its syntax disclosesand I mean thisa new English by which we might speak what we now can only feel. These poems structure our attention like lightnlcS