Veil and BurnConcerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be. |
Contents
1 | |
3 | |
4 | |
In a Field Distractions Rise | 7 |
Riches | 9 |
Seizure or Seduction of Persephone | 13 |
Large Loop Excision of the Temporal Zone | 16 |
Onion | 20 |
Inheritance | 42 |
Hypoethesia | 44 |
On My Husbands Birthday I Read Obituaries | 46 |
Reluctant Pegasus | 47 |
Wrong Turn Near Pecos | 63 |
Retrobulbar | 66 |
The Merle | 68 |
Undressing the Tree | 69 |
Cutting Distance | 21 |
After Eight Years | 24 |
In Japan Woman Can Doze with Man Pillow | 26 |
Work | 27 |
Into Wind | 29 |
Ode to the Upper Lip | 31 |
Frankensteins Lesions | 33 |
Alfred Hitchcock Meets the Blob | 37 |
Dog on Her Side PostAmputation | 40 |
The Shaking | 70 |
Heron | 71 |
Eating the Night | 72 |
Nicholas Ray Directs a Poem | 73 |
Back Lot Field Notes | 76 |
Washing Up | 78 |
Notes | 81 |
back cover | 91 |
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Common terms and phrases
Alice Fulton Back Lot Field blue body bone brain cane close dance Dave Smith David Wagoner dream feel field film find fingers first flesh flower fluid flying folds fosephine Miles Fragment Frederick Morgan girth glass graze hair hand Harper hold hole horse horse’s Hypoesthesia Illinois Press Jim Barnes Kevin Stein kick kidney kiss knee Large Loop Excision Laurie Clements Lambeth legs Len Roberts lesions light limbs look Lorna Goodison Lot Field Notes Mark Doty Maxine Kumin Michael Van Walleghen Miller Williams mother mouth National Poetry Series needle night numbness optic pillow Poems Michael Praise pulled Reluctant Pegasus Review right eye ring Robert Wrigley Roberts Sandra McPherson screen Selected Poems sensation shaking shoulder side skin sorrel space Stephen Berg stroke swirl Sydney Lea syringe Temporal Zone theater thigh thin tonight University of Illinois Veil and Burn wake wall wash watch window
Popular passages
Page 3 - What is it that you want? I daub her bedsores with scarlet oil; the sting evident in flinches, failed attempts to kick me. She's gone down again, scraped her sides all night on the stall floor. I mark each wound on the eye, legs, pelvis with red circles of balmy correction: don't try lying down again, or else.
Page 4 - At some point an animal must give in to the sentence given. What I didn't see until then: the loaded truck that came to hoist the mare's body, the barn cats rolling in the dark pool the needle left, the even spots of blood trailing across the ground, ellipses.
Page 3 - Horse-trainer 1927-1999 In the photo I've never seen, she stands (or leans), bowlegged as Richard beside her, his legs long, slim, still roundly gripped to the sides of some young thoroughbred visible only in the space between his knees. Her legs, hind and front, curl...
Page 4 - The next day, Richard walks me to the barn. I know he's been in for chemo but I say nothing: a moment when there is too much space for articulation of my fear, his pain.