Join us for the kick-off of National Poetry Month with a celebration of the new book The Great Wave by Ron Slate. Slate is the author of The Incentive of the Maggot which was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award.

Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973 and did his doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Great Wave

I predict, like the one who was sucked to sea

and returned in an Arabian container ship,

all small worlds will be dashed and drowned.

I witnessed this deliverance on a silent television,

my fingers disquieted a bowl of almonds,

a librarian called to say Constantinople is on hold.

The entire surface trembled, an oscillation

like a bell. When the seismologist said the Eurasian plate

“delivered a blow to our planet,” his words

were almost enough to renew our belief

in the earth’s roundness, the tidal sugars and salts

of our bodies, the atonement of death camp clerks.

When I was a child, I discovered my depravity

among the other boys – but we were sanguine all the same,

with the fortitude to face what we’d found.

So now, led to abandon the world

for word of the world’s moments,

one must be cautious and deliberate.

I had a dream -- high-water marks on the side

of my house, the aftermath of a deluge

rising from a spring in the cellar.

I didn’t realize the floodwaters would recede

with the violence of their rising, fishing boats

torn from moorings, dome of the mosque collapsed.

You who savor the scent of the linden

live in a small world, and I also speak

from a cramped provisional space.

On the stacked ship they videotaped

as they passed, then circled back to pluck

a single man from floating debris –

I witnessed this alone on a glowing screen,

I couldn’t lift an almond to my mouth,

I was a fallow field ruined by brackish flood,

but I would choose the wave over the wind,

I would swamp your world with wreckage,

I would hold fast to you, and you would be saved.

The Great Wave (Hardcover)

By Ron Slate

$23.00

ISBN-13: 9780547232744
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 4/2009

Other Editions of this Title

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