Ethan Paquin

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Biographical note:  Ethan Paquin is the author of The Makeshift, which was published in England in 2002 and appears in this book for the first time outside the UK. He created and has been editor of the international poetry journal Slope (www.slope.org) since 1999, and in 2001 founded the small press, Slope Editions. His poetry has been published throughout the US, Europe and Australia, and his criticism appears in journals including The Boston Review, Verse, Canadian Review of Books and Contemporary Poetry Review, for which he is contributing editor. A native of New Hampshire, he is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710157
ISBN-10:  1844710157
ISBN-13:  9781844710157
Author:  Ethan Paquin
Title:  Accumulus
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jul-03
Extent:  156pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  234 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Accumulus is a collection of Ethan Paquin’s first two books of poems, The Makeshift and Dead July. The former was released in the UK in 2002, to widespread critical notice (it has already been reviewed or mentioned three times in The TLS alone, as well as in PN Review and elsewhere), and Dead July has not before been published. Paquin’s work draws on various poetic traditions and is influenced by voices both classic and contemporary; Accumulus pairs the language play of Paquin’s first book with the sparse, meditative lyricism of his second to create a texture unlike that of the work of many other younger American poets writing today.

Table of contents:
The Makeshift
Part I
Having Learned to Sing, I Find it Difficult
Awake, First Light
Episodic
The Root of Everything
Reverie
Diary
The Near-Miss Slides
Ghazal
Note to Myself: On Self-Importance
Bolus
More Like Montpelier
Apostasy
Sonata
Lingerings Near Southern April
Laughter is X, Laughter is Y
The Makeshift
The Mandarin
Interpreter
Not This, Mirror
Two Hypotheses
Apogee Brevita
Part II
A Vision, Winter
Flight Pattern
To a Child Not Yet Afraid of the Dark
Like the Song Goes. “There’s a Man With
Study of Three Men With Faces Painted by Francis Bacon
Rural Notebook
Textures of Domesticity
Rooms, Steadily Darkening
Entries Fitted for Freezing Rain
Sad
Box
Canned Cloudscape
Terrarium, a Quincunx
One Field
The Use of Reinhardt
Melancholia
County Farm, Solitude
Oriel
Möbius in Wind
Final Days of the Affair
Journeyman, a Reverie
Wanderer
Just Before Diversion
Dead July
Thunder Over Louisville
Self-Portrait with Quiet Cirrus, Dusk
Poem I’ve Written, It -
When I Don’t think of this World
Having No One Else to Turn To, I Consult the Night Hour
Gone Music
Like an Empty
Wistful
From Angles
God
Curassow
Meadow
Hearing Music Through Dark Trees
Revenant
Problem, Explained, Answered
The Director
Anteros
High Horizon
Capstone
It Makes No Difference
Jottings
Rains
Ars Cryotica
Ur-Dissonance
Fissure
Riverbend
Mountains Falling
In the Wake of Fallen Mountains
Portrait With the Entrance of Dusk and Flags Lightly Swimming in Sunset
Procession
Still Water
Woe
The Good
Girl, Night
Scythe and Dory
Dark Sky and Bulb from Miles Away
Woe
Woe
Troubled by Time
Sparrows
Reinhardt in Winter
End/Again
Errata
The Rest

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Excerpt from book:  

Revenant

if the son is dead,
if the music, dredged –


if the granite is cool,
not charged with heat –


if I speak forthright,
but my mind’s on Spain


(really, aren’t we all off some–
where like Spain, sea of dust) –


if words reject covenance
with their meanings –


if trees reject their leaning,
leaves forego their revenance –


if rains flush the rust
to thus bear my face – come


back, skin, hide no longer – rain,
you loner, backdrop, backlight,


if you’d only quit your retreat –
then the world be awrap in tulle,


stippled colour of the failed,


colour of bells drowned

Unpublished endorsement:  On The Makeshift: From stanza to stanza, the energy, the rhythms, the tones and the tensions shift like the muscles of a moving snake. It is impossible to put [The Makeshift] aside.

Forrest Gander

Unpublished endorsement:  On The Makeshift: Paquin is a hundred times faster, a hundred times more vulnerable, a hundred times more intelligent than many before him … The Makeshift [is] moving.

Tomaz Salamun

Review quote:  Paquin is a strong poet because he is a poet of ideas with a tremendous command of the language of desire.

P.N. Review