No Arcadia by D Eric Parkison

No Arcadia by D Eric Parkison

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Attentive as hell, Eric Parkison's poems with their crunchy, original music of consonant and vowel, show us a vivid reality. Here, in convincing detail, is country life: the natural world and human ways of dealing with it: the wood stove with its cleanout panel; the harshly efficient cider press and its hard-won sweetness; an unforgettable hand-cranked machine for sorting the grades and sizes of potatoes. A genuine poetry-the real thing-makes this unsentimental world of work, ruination and survival into a leaping-goat celebration of clarity. -Robert Pinsky
Eric Parkison's No Arcadia takes conscious aim at the world of pastoralism and harmony with nature, offering instead a vision of a shorn landscape that is true to post-industrial America, a landscape populated by poisonous hogweed, polluted creeks and junked cars. This chapbook acknowledges the ugliness of such a world: there's no way to master such a broken thing, one poem says, while another realizes, The people before us / Knew not to want more than you can have, and a third concludes, Our luck is a dear thing.
And yet, like the apple sugar tasted by an ex-Marine during cider-making, there is much sweetness, too, in these keenly observed poems. One of them is entitled Asymptote, after a figure in analytic geometry: and here, indeed, the curve of feeling approaches but never quite touches the straight line of reality. This not-quite-touching is the saving grace of a collection in which feeling and reality are held in an infinite relationship. You try now to love those things, Parkison says, that waste can only slowly undo.-Karl Kirchwey
Arcadia: Pan was born there; & it was harmonious in myth, unspoiled. As promised, this book is not those things, not harmony (but music, threadbare metric), not freshness (but bad-breathing life). It has its own reverse-Pan presiding, middle-class rural distance, hopelessness, rot & the trees that make it through. So: we know this place. But we've not had a mind like Parkison's bend attention to it, driven by self-doubt into a far, far corner of hurt to plant the germ and wait, sun or no. To write this way requires a certain constitution-one might say honor. And what is precious? he wonders. Not years.-Joseph Spece

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781945804984
ISBN 10	194580498X
Title	No Arcadia
Author	D Eric Parkison
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Jane's Boy Press
Year published	2020-08-04
Number of pages	54
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable