Description |
77 pages ; 21 cm. |
|
text txt rdacontent |
|
unmediated n rdamedia |
|
volume nc rdacarrier |
Series |
The Iowa poetry prize |
|
Iowa poetry prize.
|
Contents |
The Swing -- Cinders -- Playing Catch with My Daughter -- Jury Duty -- Song: One Summer Afternoon in the Country -- One Bright Autumn -- On Certain Cold Days -- My Polish Grandfather -- The Wolverine -- A Late Detail from the Depression -- Close to Trees -- A Dream in the Carpathians -- The Bunker in the Parsley Fields -- Picked Out a Toka, a Stanley -- The Sister -- Dogtoothed Violets -- In the Garden with Margaret -- The Cougar -- Flicker -- The Great Horned Owl -- Lavina -- Collecting Cowpies -- The Stone -- Delicately in Small Measure -- A Lullaby -- Prayer -- In St. Peter's Home for Nuns -- Skookumchuck -- Umbels -- I Call My Mother -- Josef of Moravia -- Sunday Morning: Marilee Combs Her Red Hair -- In Puerto Rico, She Says. |
Summary |
The Bunker in the Parsley Fields takes its cues from the particular music made by an old-fashioned rope swing; from a child ramming a trike over and over against a bomb shelter that is in the way; from a boy bouncing a ball off abandoned chinchilla hutches; from a man and a woman pushing a tremendous stone up a hill, lost between the slope and their shoulders - and once, in the orchard, lost in laughter. |
|
Many of the poems, including the title poem, come from the year that Gary Gildner lived in Slovakia. It was 1992-93, when Czechoslovakia split in two, a year of heightened excitement and uncertainty. Gildner and his wife lived in a cement box of a flat like thousands of others cheek by jowl above an abandoned bunker not far from the Tatra Mountains. They returned to a new home in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains, with Elizabeth expecting a child. The ideas of home, settlement, birth, rebirth, the past, the future, direction, luck, what matters, love, and work flow through the poems that shape this book. |
Awards |
Iowa Poetry Prize. |
ISBN |
0877455872 (paper : alk. paper) |
|
9780877455875 (paper : alk. paper) |
|