Musing
sonnets by Jonathan Locke Hart
April 2011
Paperback
978-1-897425-90-9 (SC)
April 2011
Ebook
978-1-897425-91-6 (pdf)
Series
Mingling Voices
Subject
Poetry
Complete audio book now available
Be drawn into the poetry of Jonathan Locke Hart as he reads sonnets from his book, Musing. Simply click on the tab below marked "Audiobook" and choose from the list of poems to open the audio file.
About the Book
Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience.
The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart's poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: "These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels."
About the Author
Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems have been published in Estonian, French, and Greek. He teaches at the University of Alberta, and his recent books include Dream China, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.
Download the eBook
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.
Contents
DownloadFront Matter
DownloadIntroduction: The Poetry of Jonathan Hart
DownloadMusing
DownloadAcknowledgements
DownloadIndex of First Lines
DownloadAbout the Author
sonnets by Jonathan Locke Hart
musing
Index of First Lines
[order sonnets numerically | alphabetically]
The boughs lay withered beyond the brow 1
What is not said in the garden 2
The sparrow on the trough is world enough 3
The garden in the ruined abbey brims 4
Your face was the chalk in these hills 5
The fen stretches out like prairie, the canals 6
They married looking out to sea, the west 7
All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed 8
The winter of our breath was the blue 9
So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me 10
Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger 11
You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect 12
The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park 13
Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher 14
The aspersion she cast cuts deep: the times 15
Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16
Son, you were allergic to filberts then 17
Daughter, you are more delicate 18
Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves 19
The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road 20
This harvest is the sap that moves in us, 21
The dog beyond the gate barked, as if 22
If joy could screeve from lung and marrow 23
You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24
The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25
The renitency of the will opposes all 26
The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape 27
The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard. 28
The windows of the moon have cast 29
They were quartering us in these streets 30
There was a window on the stars, the cusp 31
Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend 32
Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode 33
There was jazz playing in a room away 34
The winds rise over the plain outside Paris 35
Till we fled Calais these two terrains 36
Window night-frame time of the moon 37
I have washed too many I have watched 38
There were stones there were knives 39
It's not custom to begin with the couplet 40
The angles of the moon over, through those trees, 41
The absence of your breath heats my marrow 42
The embarrassment of words abandons us 43
The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice 44
Just when it seems she will sing deport 45
Through the threshold the pollen draws, the light 46
And yet the morning light held you, the cuts 47
When I was young the world was young: you know 48
It would be as the wind, but some force 49
This night, like the vanity of death, 50
Palm trees came to France in 1864 51
Freezing to death is not an act of love 52
Your arms are not a trope, and hyperbole 53
Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way 54
So much depends on the glibness of words, 55
I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr 56
When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed 57
The closer to the ground, the more fictional 58
Silent devotion at first light, wind 59
Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones 60
The way trains move, poetry moves 61
I have a whole cache I will one day 62
You see before you a man more ridiculous 63
In your eyes along the streets can I see 64
A Romanesque bridge joins one hill 65
Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed, 66
The country is not pastoral: it was 67
Nostalgia and utopia, past and future, 68
The nuclear power plants smoke over the land 69
The clouds lie over the land near Avignon 70
The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71
Another poet scoffed when I said 72
Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun 73
Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out 74
The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75
On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk 76
Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77
Who would hear me above the surf, the remains 78
The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79
My heart is even lonelier than my face 80
Winter has its verges, not a green snow 81
Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds 82
Remember our mothers who bore us 83
The season of our wooing, a stillness now, 84
World, breath, disinherited us, even 85
A certain happiness exists despite 86
Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones 87
Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France 88
Our whatever is an asymptote and not 89
It is not as if the sun and I 90
The white cliffs above Cassis 91
The shadows of the evening still across 92
For him, there is only one poet: his wife. 93
Something rebarbative lives in this life 94
These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age 95
You watch the dying light after the star 96
There's something about a train that is like 97
On the brink of simile I faced 98
Your heart is knapped flint, or is it mine? 99
Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some, 100
The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape 101
The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant 102
The speculation of music has 103
We rose from dust on a day not of our 104
The wind was slapping the water, and the surf 105
What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106
You don't have to be Richard the Third 107
How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108
The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died 109



