An anthology, from the 1980s to recent work.
An Agincourt Trefoil consists of three poems about the 15th century battle, written in the voices of three participants: a soldier who may be English or French, a Gascon crossbowman, and an arrow.
Temptation and Revision is a parting shot, fired by an old revolutionary, after the fall of Chile's Pinochet regime.
Neither drink nor feasting is a sermon.
The short stories include several that are slightly displaced in time, for example, The Featureless Plain and The Assault on Cerro Roja. Another piece, The Remnant, explores the edges where age and experience come together.
The Bodies is a script for a micro-play, with a couple talking about the vague boundaries between kinds of state violence.
The Station at Avignon is a new piece, not published before. In 1971, a young woman drives back from O'Hare Airport, dropping off a lover and his best friend for their trip to boot camp.
The title of this collection comes from a contemporary Irish expression, "Lost the run of himself". In the first poem, the author asserts that he hasn't yet lost his. He invites the reader to form an independent opinion on that subject.
From the introduction:
"Neither here nor in most of my other writing will you find much explanation. For me, the pleasure of doing this comes in the moment when I realize that I can just stop, just leave it up to you to answer your questions.
"Why did your character do that?"
"Why do you think she did it?"
If this sounds familiar, it should. It's not a new approach to fiction, poetry, or any other kind of expression. A symbol is a symbol, and it isn't and can't be the thing it symbolizes, whether it's framed as a story, a picture, or as a Venus figurine.
Some symbols go farther down the road; they spend more time fleshing out the details, but they're still symbols, and they still require you to translate them into your personal version of the original. I just enjoy seeing how little language I can use and still, I hope, give your mind and experience something to work on."
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The Run of Myself is available on Kindle as an Ebook and in hardcopy.
