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Marianne Boruch
MOSS BURNING

Cloth $17.95
(ISBN 0-932440-64-9)

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A remarkable collection, astonishing in its brave intelligence, its deadpan humor, its highly charged, vital music. Through her investigations of a remembered Catholic childhood, of the delights and challenges of domestic life, of the varieties of midwestern landscape, Marianne Boruch weaves a brilliant meditation on the intersections of the visible and the invisible worlds.

"Moss Burning is the mature work of a poet whose voice has become necessary. Its poetry is capable of revealing to us an inner world--a 'spirit self'--we might not otherwise know we had."
--The Georgia Review

Marianne Boruch is also the author of A Stick That Breaks and Breaks and Poems: New & Selected.

 
IN APRIL

Near the bike racks, a dog
is losing his mind, thinking--what?--
that life as a dog
isn't one big bone, days are short,
and memory is a complicated scent.

Believe this too: everyone
is cheerful--it's April--printed flowers
all over their corny short-shorts.
Up the street, another stand of trees, and another
and another on that high hairline.
Tree thoughts, straight
out of the head, though a little redundant.
But nothing's really in leaf. Limbs still sway and creak,
twigs in the buff: the mind's
a genie in its bone bare socket.

The dog keeps at it--sniffing.
I see right through to his ribs, through the ribs
to the soft parts, all order and pulse--
of course, the buried heart
where all dark liquid begins.

--Marianne Boruch

Copyright c 1993 by Marianne Boruch. May not be reproduced without permission.


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