Donna Trussell

The poems might be great, but the book covers are often plain or downright ugly. Poet Gary Sullivan has blogged on the subject.

I think poets are beginning to catch on. Jane Levin’s new chapbook Legacy has a gorgeous cover.

I’ve written about the arresting cover of Revolt of the Crash Test Dummies by Jim Daniels. Compare that one to the cover of Daniels’ first book of poems, Places/Everyone.

The cover of Frank Giampietro‘s new book of poems Begin Anywhere would get noticed in any section of a bookstore, but especially in the poetry aisle.

I like the cover of Mission Work, the debut by Sewanee fellow Aaron Baker. The book won the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Bakeless Prize, judged by Stanley Plumly.

Baker was raised by missionaries living in Papua New Guinea, and his poems reflect an environment that is lush, ritualistic and equal parts seductive and frightening.

Notebook
by Aaron Baker

Noon’s light spread like an altar-cloth upon a field,
the everywhere-glistening like birth of the inner forest,

now everywhere I look is home.

Voices sing over the river where my bare-chested father
cradles the neck of a drenched boy lifted out of the water.

A brain of green fire, mountains roll
from the Chimbu in tightly ridged coils.

White boulders spilled upon the crests are places
to set my boots before I return on trails
through hilltop gardens                      Home.

In my notebook I write letters to grandma,
songs in pidgin, the names of plants from a textbook.

Jesus likem algeta, algeta, algeta.

Thanks for the books. I’m reading A Tale of Two Cities.
Next month I’ll be twelve. Say hi to grandpa.

Rhododendron, frangipani, dandelion, devil’s claw.
______

With my hand splayed before my face

I see in the spaces between fingers
smoke curl
above roofs, pigs snuffle the dirt in their pens.

Black water glides between my knuckles,
black cliffs fall up from my finger-tips

and village paths run into the world
like veins from both sides.

I make a fist because I can,
a little blood-light in the skin between bones.

How alike this is to prayer, that course
of brightness from the amber floorboards of my bedroom
that gathers in my folded hands

and coils to a substance behind closed eyes
before it knows how to rise.

I’d call this home,
forgetting the street of green squares in the States,
the two o’clock mail and six o’clock hiss of sprinklers

and take into my eye, Meugle, though I was born on the other side
of the flood in old times and served other gods

your skill with the hatchet,
the bravery that makes your dive sleek from the bridge,

Ditowagle, your quick laugh and cool center of patience,

so from my eye to my voice
I am not so strange, not so dangerous or different

from why you make a small ceremony of planting at the end
of the dry season or smear pig-grease on your skin when you marry.
______

Grandma, the drawing is of Weangl clouting the pig
that rooted up her sweet potatoes. Please give
this letter for Kevin to Mrs. Arnold.

Myrmecodia, bamboo, pit-pit, banana.

This is how, though I needed for nothing
on the mountain-side terrace and in the creek-bottomed canyon,

I came to a place where they killed a pig in my honor
and called me by something much like my name.

Originally published in Post Road
Posted with kind permission of the author