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    Vox Humana
    Vox Humana
    Vox Humana
    Ebook95 pages40 minutes

    Vox Humana

    By E. Alex Pierce

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    About this ebook

    Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on.

    E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateApr 30, 2011
    ISBN9781771313308
    Vox Humana
    Author

    E. Alex Pierce

    E. Alex Pierce, author of Vox Humana, lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia. She conducts manuscript review workshops throughout Canada, and is Senior Editor at Boularderie Island Press. Pierce holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and for ten years taught Creative Writing at Cape Breton University. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. Her most recent publications are Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotia Writers (Editor) and Salt and Wild: Shelburne County Anthology (Co-editor).

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      Book preview

      Vox Humana - E. Alex Pierce

      Vox Humana

      Vox Humana

      E. Alex Pierce

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Pierce, E. Alex, 1943-

             Vox humana / E. Alex Pierce.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-1-926829-71-5

      I. Title.

      PS8631.I469V69 2011         C811’.6         C2011-904252-5

      Copyright © E. Alex Pierce, 2011

      We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government

      of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts

      Council for their support of our publishing program.

      The cover image is a photograph by George Steeves from the series

      The Pictures of Ellen, © George Steeves, Collection of the National

      Gallery of Canada.

      The author photograph was taken by Philip Aulenbach.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      For my mother, Eileen Lloyd Pierce.

      Contents

      In the Sand Hills

      Boat

      Eternal Lines

      Last Summer in the Old Craig House

      A girl awake

      Ice Mother

      Archduke Trio

      Palm Mother

      Reading Shakespeare

      Aunt Edna

      Because to the majesty

      Travelling with My Mother

      Vox humana

      No Address

      Their Boy

      Driving Back

      Slow Music

      The Snakes Transform in the Woodpile

      Common Loons

      Vox animalia

      Shelter

      Desdemona

      My Jerusalem

      You wrote to me

      Madonna of the Pinks

      Solstice

      Reading You

      The Returning

      Ophelia’s Book

      Penthesilea’s Horse

      Cio-Cio San Arrives at Your Door

      Athena’s Hand on Cassandra’s Shoulder

      Hendrick Goltzius’ Hand

      Ophelia’s Portrait

      Anastasia’s Soldier

      Sestina on Six Words from Frances Itani’s Deafening

      Ich habe genug: It Is Enough

      Snow White & Rose Red

      (i) Veil

      (ii) White Camel

      (iii) A Day for the Heroes

      (iv) Song for the Bear

      (v) Rose Red

      Arioso

      Notes and Sources

      Acknowledgements

      Biographical Note

      Now I should add that the light here is heartbreakingly beautiful, the marshes green gold, the creek water clear; how there comes a desire simply to merge with it, to lie down, curl one’s body into an earth shape, die with the leaves, bend into that lucent sky, become the vagabond, the wanderer, the invisible, the other, the lost child that every child is, the one before becoming, before they made us who we are, the voice that is the under-singing, the one we have forgotten.

      In the Sand Hills

      Down in the dunes is a language place, lost U-vowel of the sound turned round,

      guts of the rabbit strewn over ground. Grit of the fir cones, peeled by squirrels.

      No one is here. Shadow of a lost imagined pony skin, lichen scab

      creeps over the dune ridge. Trees, grown up, grown over, an acre of sand.

      Layer of forest floor, tangle of alder – closing the pathways. Tongue

      of cold sand, far up inland, a half mile from shore – I want it back.

      I want it all clean. I want Mozart in a piano-echoed room, scales in thirds.

      I want my mother making shapes of everything, poems in thin air.

      My father singing hymns in the car all the way from Sable River

      to Liverpool – Hunts Point, Summerville, and Port Mouton.

      I want to be always in that car when we slow down for the turn

      at Robertsons Lake – that big rock ledge with the lemonade springs

      where the bluebird sings in the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I want to be

      in that clear, sweet space. I want to write my poems then,

      grow up again, breathe in that clean, light air. I want to have

      my babies then, take

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