Musings is a book of sonnets. Working within the frameworkof a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extendedmeditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets,some of the poems are traditional, some innovative. Throughout, Hartdeftly imparts a European poetic flavour to a fundamentally NorthAmerican experience.
The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholarGordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked theevolution of Hart’s poetry. Of Musings, Teskey writes:"These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historicalconsciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heartthrough all its levels."
Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared inmany prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems havebeen published in Estonian, French, and Greek. He teaches at theUniversity of Alberta, and his recent books include DreamChina, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.
Index of First Lines
A certain happiness exists despite 86
A Romanesque bridge joins one hill 65
All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed 8
And yet the morning light held you, the cuts 47
Another poet scoffed when I said 72
Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher 14
Daughter, you are more delicate 18
Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed 66
Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way 54
For him, there is only one poet: his wife 93
Freezing to death is not an act of love 52
Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77
Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode 33
How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108
I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr 56
I have a whole cache I will oneday 62
I have washed too many I have watched 38
If joy could screeve from lung and marrow 23
Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16
In your eyes along the streets can I see 64
It is not as if the sun andI 90
It would be as the wind, but some force 49
It’s not custom to begin with the couplet 40
Just when it seems she will sing deport 45
Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend 32
Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some 100
Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out 74
My heart is even lonelier than my face 80
Nostalgia and utopia, past and future 68
On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk 76
On the brink of simile I faced 98
Our whatever is an asymptote and not 89
Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France 88
Palm trees came to France in 1864 51
Remember our mothers who bore us 83
Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones 87
Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds 82
Silent devotion at first light, wind 59
So much depends on the glibness of words, 55
So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me 10
Something rebarbative lives in this life 94
Son, you were allergic to filberts then 17
Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger 11
The absence of your breath heats my marrow 42
The angles of the moon over, through those trees 41
The aspersion she cast cuts deep: thetimes 15
The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died 109
The boughs lay withered beyond the brow 1
The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71
The closer to the ground, the morefictional 58
The clouds lie over the land near Avignon 70
The country is not pastoral: it was 67
The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park 13
The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79
The dog beyond the gate barked, as if 22
The embarrassment of words abandonsus 43
The fen stretches out like prairie, thecanals 6
The garden in the ruined abbey brims 4
The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant 102
The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice 44
The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape 101
The nuclear power plants smoke over the land 69
The renitency of the will opposes all 26
The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25
The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape 27
The season of our wooing, a stillness now 84
The shadows of the evening still across 92
The sparrow on the trough is world enough 3
The speculation of music has 103
The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road 20
The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard 28
The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75
The way trains move, poetry moves 61
The white cliffs above Cassis 91
The wind was slapping the water, and the surf 105
The winds rise over the plain outside Paris 35
The windows of the moon have cast 29
The winter of our breath was the blue 9
There was a window on the stars, the cusp 31
There was jazz playing in a room away 34
There were stones there were knives 39
There’s something about a train that islike 97
These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age 95
They married looking out to sea, the west 7
They were quartering us in these streets 30
This harvest is the sap that moves in us 21
This night, like the vanity of death 50
Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones 60
Through the threshold the pollen draws, thelight 46
Till we fled Calais these twoterrains 36
Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves 19
We rose from dust on a day not of our 104
What is not said in the garden 2
What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106
When I was young the world was young: you know 48
When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed 57
Who would hear me above the surf, the remains 78
Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun 73
Window night-frame time of the moon 37
Winter has its verges, not a green snow 81
World, breath, disinherited us,even 85
You don’t have to be Richard the Third 107
You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect 12
You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24
You see before you a man more ridiculous 63
You watch the dying light after the star 96
Your arms are not a trope, andhyperbole 53
Your face was the chalk in thesehills 5
Your heart is knapped flint, or is itmine? 99