Earthly Freight
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Pelagic Fervor Ancient instinct and desire—these alone must drive the storm petrels to their haunting antiphonal songs, chase flights and aerial duets (her call, always lower-pitched, to draw him in) and then in the burrow, —in between chatterings and purrings— to preen, tenderly stroke one another, and finally to couple. Most years, one egg —that season’s fragile chance. Then, in league with the night, the driven parents spell one another— first to brood the egg, and again, after the hatch, mostly on starless nights —one out to sea, one back to land—they carom like black arrows shot through the island woods to whisk food to their underground chick. Finally, instinct calls them again, now to leave their chick behind—a sudden orphan drawn skyward—to find the sea on its own, to harness the wind in soaring spirals— and to forage by hovering low, stalling and stirring up prey with delicate foot-patter on the bright, indifferent water.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
“Earthly Freight is a beautiful and brave collection of poetry, abounding with rich life experience carefully considered. In the tradition of Yeats and Frost, Lindsay Knowlton uses images from the natural world of manatees and waxwings and oxen and owls to reveal profound truths about human events and relationships, from the untimely death of a beloved brother to a difficult father to loves failed and blessed. With Earthly Freight, Knowlton shows us how, by paying close attention, we can enrich and validate our own lives and loves. This is a marvelous book.”
—Howard Frank Mosher, novelist Disappearances, Where the River Flows North
“There’s certainly something to be said for the notion that poetry is—or can be—a kind of mathematics, with subject elements factored in rather than out. What you get is not computable, but not arguable either. Take these lines from Knowlton’s “Central Park”, touching on the simultaneous advents of spring and a brother’s fatal cancer: “…I saw that facts/were chaff,/that in perishing’s lone distillery/exactitude drifts/like a petal…” They may not prove anything, but they are balancing life and death. That’s a pretty powerful equation. And there are fifty-three more Knowlton poems in this truly impressive collection.”
—Peter Kane Dufault, poet Looking in All Directions, Selected Poems 1954-2000,
To Be in the Same World, 2007, 1996 Norton Anthology
About the Author
Lindsay Knowlton received her BA degree from Skidmore College and her MFA degree in poetry from Warren Wilson College. She has been a past recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities. She has twice been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and received the Washington Poetry Prize from the Word Works, Inc. She lives in an old farmhouse in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, relishes the Maine Coast, and is an avid birder, traveler, and walker.