Ornithologies [Paperback]

Joshua Poteat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006

Poetry. Poteat's ORNITHOLOGIES is the winner of the 2004 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. "With natural elegance and untiring invention, Joshua Poteat writes some of the most remarkable poetry you are ever likely to encounter. In storylines that move beyond the virtues of narrative into a region of wonder, combining violence and tenderness in an intimate voice capable of revelations as swift and sudden as the sear of lightning, his poems work themselves into the cloudy fabric of your imagination and reside there as unforgettable experiences."-Blackbird. "Poteat tells me things as if I were an audience but invisible. Or as if I were the moon. Yet something real passes between us, which is to say that the book is very good, that it leaves its mark. For here we are the audience of what is clearly an inner voice, flowing forward, throwing out its lovely perceptions, its lyrical lines of praise, its wonderment, its pursuit of moments and places, past and present, where mystery's veil for a moment spark

Editorial Reviews

Review

“... Joshua Poteat writes some of the most remarkable poetry you are ever likely to encounter... " --From Blackbird, Spring 2003, Vol. 2, No. 1:

"....For here we are the audience of what is clearly an inner voice, flowing forward, throwing out its lovely perceptions...” --Mary Oliver, judge for the 2004 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Award

About the Author

Joshua Poteat has won awards from American Literary Review, River City, Nebraska Review, Marlboro Review, Columbia, Bellingham Review, Yemassee, Lullwater Review, Vermont Studio Center, Catskill Writing Workshop, American Poetry Archives/San Francisco State University, and Universities West Press. He won the 2004 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. In 2001, he was the Summer Writer-in-Residence at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center and, in 2002, was awarded an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts featured him in their Spring 2003 issue. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Greensboro Review, Lit, and many others. His work is part of a two-year international traveling exhibition, Pivot Points, featuring three generations of painters and poets, including Larry Levis, Dave Smith, and Gregory Donovan. He grew up in the woods and marshes of Hampstead, North Carolina, and now lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he edits assorted texts, including art criticism and junk mail for credit card companies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 118 pages
• Publisher: Anhinga Press, Inc. (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0938078909
• ISBN-13: 978-0938078906
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Language Close to the World, March 24, 2006

By 

Adam Day "Adam Day" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ornithologies (Paperback)

Poteat won the 2004 Poetry Society of American chapbook contest, which resulted in the publication of his wonderful chapbook, Meditations. It's interesting now to see many of the poems from Meditations, a number of his other poems previously published at Blackbird.com, all together, situated among the other poems. In the new, broader context of Ornithologies, it's like seeing all of these poems almost entirely anew. This says something important about the poetry's ability to endure, its staying power, and about the quality and import of their content.

There is a kind of grandness and still, a muscular fragility to the writing in Ornithologies, and it's a beautiful book, physically, and in content. The poems here are full and lush, and have certainly found their form and are comfortable in their bodies. There is a striking balance between the sonics, imagery and narrative, so that we are absorbed by the poems, leaving the waking world behind. The physical and spiritual worlds quietly collide in these poems, and what might seem far removed from the everyday life is brought to bear, which is to say that to read these poems is not simply an emotive, or reminiscent experience, but one that spurs one to thought. This may seem a statement to be applied to most poetry, but indeed it is the exception rather than the rule. Jarrell could have been speaking of Ornithologies when he said of Paterson, "The subject of Paterson is: How can you tell the truth about things?-that is, how can you find a language so close to the world that the world can be represented and understood in it?"

Ornithologies brings to mind Davis McCombs, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jennifer Grotz, Jason Schneiderman, Dan Chiasson, Steve Gehrke, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Kathy Graber, and Patrick Phillips - they've all, relatively recently, written impressive first books, and that's saying something because first books are a damn tricky thing. (If you need convincing, look at a favorite poet's first book and marvel at its unsettled awkwardness compared to the poet's later work. Ornithologies would convince you that this is actually Poteat's third or fourth book.)

Not to overstate it, but at a time when one cannot help but feel that poets are publishing too much, too often, and that so much of that work is tragically average and often unimportant, Poteat's Ornithologies feels significantly relevant to the reader's world, and thematically, rhetorically, imagistically, and otherwise substantial.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves a National Audience--from Style Weekly in Richmond, VA, January 12, 2006

By 

Darren E. Morris - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ornithologies (Paperback)

Be careful when reading "Ornithologies" (Anhinga Press) by Joshua Poteat. His poems are so mysterious, eloquent and downright powerful, they may ruin you with beauty. Good poetry calls attention to what would otherwise be overlooked, but the best poetry changes us. Poteat's poems succeed in showing us "what it means to be/honey in a tobacco pouch, the skin of God in a firefly's gut."

Because existence is uncertain, his narrators relentlessly name the knowable world, as if cataloging can protect us against our own disappearance. He brings us closer, not merely through a rich inventiveness, but through the narrative position itself, which is reverent of all it observes.

In "Nocturne: For the Night Workers of the South," he is a night watchman at an asylum, where "when it rained,/spotted-moth larva would tunnel from the wet plaster ceilings/and drink the patient's ears." In "Our Memory, the Shining Leaves (Waterford Fair Civil War Reenactment)," while watching a faux battle, he focuses on a boy who "searches the field after the skirmish/looking for a trace of what he saw (gold button: hank of hair:/glass eye in a raven's mouth)."

This is not a poet who needs a soapbox, but one who begs a small and gentle witness to the largest questions of existence. And his world is our world - built on a type of loss that the South can "understand: each thing is of itself./Each thing is its end." The poems in "Ornithologies" deserve a national audience. Read them to discover why.

Poteat graduated from the master of fine arts program at Virginia Commonwealth University (1997) and is married to the poet Allison Titus. They live in Church Hill.

-Darren Morris, review for Style Weekly 1/11/2006