Biographical note: James Thomas Stevens is the author of four books of poetry, Tokinish (First Intensity Press 1994), Combing the Snakes from His Hair (Michigan State UP 2002), and (dis)Orient (Palmpress, 2005), Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations (Subpress, 2006), and one forthcoming, The Mutual Life (Plan B Press, 2006). He is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe, attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa and holds an MFA from Brown University.
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EAN13: 9781844712700 ISBN: 9781844712700 Author: James Thomas Stevens Title: A Bridge Dead in the Water Series: Earthworks Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 28-Feb-07 Extent: 120pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 180 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation: This collection by Mohawk poet, James Thomas Stevens explores the effects of colonization on either side of the Bering Strait – China and North America. Three long poems focus on mapping, post-colonial emergencies and propoganda, while the short poems are personal experiences in China and Native America.
Main description: A dead bridge. A dead theory. The Bering Strait theory, dead to Native peoples, whose hundreds of creation accounts dispel those of anthropologists. This new collection by Mohawk poet, James Thomas Stevens, was written after a trip to China in 2002. After visiting the Catholic Xujiahui cathedral across from his hotel, he began research on Jesuit interactions with Asia. What he encountered there in the cathedral and in museums in Shanghai, was reminiscent of the history of Jesuits in his home in Iroquoia, especially in the Mohawk homelands along the Saint Lawrence River.
The first poem in the collection, (dis)Orient, addresses issues of charting and mapping, as well as issues of authority. It leads to short poems written in and about China, then on to the central poem, The Mutual Life, a poem of post-colonial and personal emergencies – a poem of healing, as well, based on a 1901 book of accidents, emergencies and illnesses published by the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. The poems proceeding are poems written in and about Iroquoia.
They are followed by my most recent undertaking, Alphabets of Letters, which explores the propaganda found in Native American children's primers from the time of our honored Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, and the propaganda of rhetoric in general. This poem explores the rhetoric of empire and the short distance our world has moved toward understanding and communication in these past few centuries.
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Table of contents: Introduction (dis)Orient Three Translations from Characters Found on a Lovers Body Five Poems from the Paintings of Lang Shining: Eight Horses Dog Under Flowers The White Gibbon Pheasants among Rocks and Flowers The Time-Telling Plant from the West Imagining Shanghai: 3 Poems: Bianfu Xishuai Long Canal The Mutual Life A Species of Martyrdom: The Huronia Series: Jean de Brébeuf Gabriel Lalemant Anthony Daniel René Goupil Jean de Lalande Isaac Jogues Noël Chabanel Charles Garnier Pax Lacrosse Night–Iroquoia Tonawanda Swamps Pan-Am The Awful Ease of Tides Alphabets of Letters
Whispers through the vegetarian dining hall stop a tardy monk on his golden-robed way. Plastic forks drop. Lóng has reappeared. It is spring at Longhua temple, cradle of the colour yellow.
Smoke from etched bronze censers winds with the late winds around the pagoda. On the stone steps beside me, five long toes, long as fingers, on a wooden sandal reach from beneath the belled-bottom of his jeans.
I try to make out the nine resemblances; head of a camel, horns of a deer, eyes of a rabbit, etc. Not there, but beneath the edge of his hard jaw I glimpse one bright pearl. Lóng, it’s spring and your five toes show an imperial line.
Purple shirted street thug shrugging whiskery strands from rabbit eyes. You take one long draw on your last cigarette, virility streaming from your bactrian nose.
I wonder at the number of scales armouring your heart—81 yang line the ridge of your left ventricle. 36 yin on the right, allow for beauty.
But the rains come and you’re gone beneath a tiled gate, leaving just hints of your glistening scales in the bark of a rain-swept pine.
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