Demos Oneiron
Harry Polkinhorn
84 pages perfectbound
$14.00
ISBN 978-1-881523-20-8
Child of our amorphous border and a lifetime boundary-walker, transcriber of unknown or scarcely remembered languages, in Demos Oneiron Harry Polkinhorn hews fast to the bafflement of dreams and the dream of language, set forth in a pensive music. He begins his book-length poem:
watching the trees careful
to feel how the light is lingering
their branches like bones a patina
of green moss from all the rain
and each leaf or twig prescient
rightly angled against a china
screen of air and old knowledge
taken each from its slot
where an origin in some
vague blend of crow call
dawn in the throat
beneath a tender gray whose
loosening grasp releases
the trees into themselves
when the dead poets emerge
from their graves thirsty for words
that have been denied them they
roll their eyes back in their heads
in search of former visions
while lips tremble to find the fit
until like tumblers falling
that set the doors to swing open
their mouths filling with
darkness
These are the visions of our everyday, filtered by millennia.
Harry Polkinhorn, despite his nine previous collections, is one of the neglected treasures of America’s poetry.
Harry Polkinhorn is a psychoanalyst, professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, and director of SDSU Press. He is the author of nine earlier collections of poetry, most recently The Circle of Willis (Ex Press, 2010); five works of fiction, including Trauma (Ex Press, 2010); ten volumes of translations; and two collections of visual poetry, including Bridges of Skin Money (Xexoxial Editions, 2008). Among the sixteen books he has edited or co-edited are Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002), with Mark Weiss; and Caló: A Dictionary of Spanish Barrio and Border Slang (Junction Press, 2011), with Alfredo Velasco.