[From the edition newly published by Xylem Books, an imprint of Corbel Stone Press, 2020. See the author’s note below for more on Loose’s engagement with the ancient Ogham runes.]
We’re thrilled to announce the release of A Book of Infernos by Jerome Rothenberg. You can buy A Book of Infernos exclusively through our website, here.
AUTHOR’S NOTE. In this poem I embrace the title “Our Ruinscape” with the joy of creating a bleak eye-space ear-space in which biodiversity, movement, competition, interaction, infector, infected, prey and predator — snake dance onto the white page.
Reverberations yes …
The sun too shines into cesspools and is not polluted.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:I first started translating The Magnetic Fields at the request of the young poet Tamás Panitz. He had been going to Gloucester to visit the poet Gerrit Lansing, a dear friend of my husband, the poet Robert Kelly. Gerrit would recommend various poetry books he thought were worth reading to Tamás, and Tamás would faithfully follow his advice. Except in this case: there was no translation available of The Magnetic Fields; the Gascoyne/Atlas edition had gone out of print and was prohibitively expensive.
Poems and poetics