This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have "authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement," says series judge W.S. Merwin.
From Seven Chimeras
The way Booth makes a love story:
same as a regular story, except
under one rock is a trapdoor that leads
to a room full of belly buttons;
each must be pushed, one is a landmine.
The way Booth makes hope:
thirty-seven acres, Black Damon,
Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire
in the Great Field and let it become
unquenchable.
The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade:
shoot the weasel in the neck
and toss it to the buzzards.
The way Booth thinks of salvation:
God holding a broken abacus,
colored beads falling away.
- ISBN10 6611728880
- ISBN13 9786611728885
- Publish Date 1 July 2001 (first published 1 January 2001)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 1 June 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 96
- Language English