How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker鈥檚 first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn鈥檚 鈥渞are earths鈥 into the 鈥渇rosty kits鈥 that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, 鈥渓iteralizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,鈥 we might construct what Wordsworth called a 鈥淐ommon Day,鈥 a communized life partaken of by all.
鈥淟insker鈥檚 poems splice and complicate realms and modes and sensory domains with wit and acute musical edgework. They are deeply, quixotically enjoined in the hard and essential 鈥榞rief of eternal joy.鈥欌濃擡mily Wilson, judge, 2013 澳洲幸运10开奖 Poetry Prize
鈥淓ric Linsker knows that poetry has an unavoidable politics, that there is no way it can be otherwise. And yet he also knows that poetry鈥檚 powers often come from glancing at the huge, such as the deaths that resulted from the protests around the building of the power plant in Dongzhou, and yet in the next moment wandering away to notice something quiet about sparrows, something about how they peck at frozen water. So he has written La Far, a book that dwells in muted devotion, that resonates from a willingness to wander both toward and away, often at the same time.鈥濃擩uliana Spahr
鈥淭his book thinks the open, enlivened by material urgency, met in verse sounded through the long Western romantic torrent of enclosure, verdure, slaughter and soul. How its honeyed years are built in other鈥檚 blood. Open against privation鈥檚 time. Open into an earth made of anguish named a 鈥榞arden.鈥 Thus to open heaven, to open like a broken heart is open鈥攐pen out.鈥濃擠ana Ward
"Linsker's poems examine the world's movement, language and identity in the internet era with a craft that is original and unnerving."鈥Publishers Weekly
Harpes et luz
soon, fumiter-crowned, you bore the strown
hedge on water,
where was the center under ashes,
and the sparrow before
appearance,
where is the hedge,
from the hedge,
said the sparrow,
quick-
set, the hedge bruised
with leaves, floating, and the tortured
grew, and those before appearance,
like waves,
decayed, bent over,
again, you said,
where is the hedge, said the sparrow,
where whit,
said whit-
age, whitecaps,
white cliffs, then you crossed the logical sand
