Ethan Paquin

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Biographical note:  Ethan Paquin is the author of three books of poetry: The Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2005); Accumulus (Salt, 2003); and The Makeshift (UK: Stride, 2002). A native of New Hampshire, he lives and teaches in Buffalo, NY.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713233
ISBN:  9781844713233
Author:  Ethan Paquin
Title:  My Thieves
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-07
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  My Thieves is a study of the relationships between the visual and literary arts, and is also a meditation on the nature of creativity and artistic authenticity. Paquin, a poet with great interest in painting and the visual arts in general, writes about those artists across disciplines who’ve influenced him using a wide range of poetic structures and forms. At the heart of the book is the concern that perhaps the creative individual is merely an imitator of all the art he has ever admired; at the book’s center is the fear that the “self” is just a collection of other selves absorbed through one’s lifetime.

Table of contents:
MY THIEVES
[My Thieves]
Lax Lax
Guidance
What is Language? [I]
What is Language? [II]
Wherefore Breeze?
Simplicity
“Simplicity” Through the Logotex
Missive
MORE OF THE MONOLOGUE
Scathologue
Towers of Buffalo
Yes, I Am An Artist
Adolph Gottlieb to the Little Animals
Brother
Tigers
Why Do I Wait for the Thunder Nightly
I Found the Reason for the Tree
Blue Composition Bombing
Ekphratica
CONTINAE
[Continae]
Stills
Nothing But Setting Out
Beautiful Nighttime Churches
Modillion Modillion Modillion
Axis of Minimal
Hampton
Toward a Shoreline
The Exhibit
Interpolation of Friend and Landscape
Dream
Processes (Overheardings)
Asteral (Lyric-like #1)
You Just Keep Going (Tong’Len #1)
Man Singing in Vermont (Lyric-like #2)
Dissituation (Lyric-like #3)
Looking Out a Window (Tong’Len #2)
Event of Chains
DARK TRACTS
Grandmother Poem
Musee Picasso
Rivers and Oceans
So You Want to Be a Sailor
Bells From the Courtyard
Go Toward the Window
Where Has the Pastoral Gone?
Ekphratic Particulates
Rocky Coast, Maine, March 1975
Water Colour
Thief of Shells
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Thief of Shells

He takes them for they are “wondrous,”
as he tells his friends over drinks.

He goes drawn to the shore all the time,
the others off to their belfries.

When he crosses the golden streets,
he likes to chart the birds’ palavering

coming from an Atlantic shrub. Atop
a sidewalk bench (he need stand on it

for she cannot see over the seawall)
he measures today’s flutter of flags

against the paraphs of yesterday. He
is enamoured of wash, of its wind.

He has a favourite tidal pool – some-
one else has his own, maybe same.

At any rate, he will look for the shells
in and around the pool, where boulders

pock like swage blocks. Each white-
ness is a revelation – little tracts,

little plots, thousands of them, dust-
dropped on three miles of shoreline.

He smiles at the sight. He wants all
day to pick up each and every one,

knowing full well this to be possible
because life, spent right, is limitless.

He smiles and begins by stooping
for the common oyster at his feet.

He will traverse the century of beach
until the inevitable rain of dusk

brings the possibility-drowning tide,
his disappointed, fog-dark walk home.


* * *


‘Thief’ is a strong word. He does homage,
not theft. And, at any rate, he would say

the shells would want him to do it, to bring
them to his mantel. There, on snowy days

for the next decades until he’s gone, their
curves and slight shallow bellies and ivory

colours will provoke him. He will look down
his array, hundreds of gently uneven silences,

or even naiads, since they once rested some-
where much more pastoral, a place they were

never even perceived of as separate realities
until someone like him took the care to see,

to notice. Yes, he has his favourites, going
up to them time and again, as when a friend

coughs. Or when autumn erases the once-hearty
colors of his herbs until obituarial black seeps

in, and they huddle against the dun New England
of the soil in submission to season, to volcanical

unholy skies. Or when he is merely sad for reasons
that any of us become sad. He cites his favourite

shells daily; they hang in his mind as footnotes
when appropriate – a new wrought-iron lamp

adorned with garlands makes him think astarte,
the joy of his wedding day so very far removed

reminds him of the shape of the lightning whelk,
the pink cockle of a ribbon in his daughter’s hair

as they walked across a wide, warm field, the smile
they shared out there beneath the vast, utter sky of

possibility, all friends were the banks of cirrus and
the darting cinnamon veeries. Now, his cottage is

cold. He pulls on his sweater, glancing out at gray
with no real way of explaining his sadnesses . . .


* * *


He keeps on collecting, keeps cluttering
her mantel. He keeps loving all he has

to love. He meets with friends but it’s all
just bittersweet. At night, his array moves

him to speak, so he does, to the silent
room. Wall calendar, miniature lighthouse,

multimodal quilt. Creaking earth, winnow
of autumnal beach breeze. He goes on,

speaking until he nods off. He will comb
his hair brusquely come morning, then read

his shells. Sometimes their reds and ivories
will move him to walk to the shore, some-

times not. In his happier moments, he’s
got a notion that these shells stole him,

piece-by-piece, one shell by one shell, in
the end removing him from the world,

from the landscape. He smiles, feeling
he’s been filled with thousands of joys.

He then, without fail, will sip gently a beer
and rock the swing, slowly, all arbours pay-

ing to him their attention, almost; the branch
lovingly above his head, his eyes wistful; and

see each shell as a marker on a map of his
life, life not as empty of life as would seem.

Unpublished endorsement :  My Thieves both confronts and attests beyond the wreckage of lyric expression to renewed, revived musics that abide by their own ruins. Through daring jarrings of genre distinctions, these poems examine their own processes in novelistic expanse, blues song mutation, and in hieroglyphs conveying the eros of suspicion as well as a humble and humane dedication to beauty various and mutable.

Dean Young

Previous review quote:  F]ormally accomplished poems … This is an author capable of a genuinely moving rawness of sincerity

Laura Mullen
New Review of Literature

Previous review quote:  Ethan Paquin’s [poems] are knife-edge sharp … he works both skillfully and elegantly with his tools – his words … Paquin’s language is nothing but evocative.

Paula Koneazny
Verse

Previous review quote:  [Paquin’s] visceral emphases sometimes bring to mind the spell-casting poetry of Robert Duncan, at other times a scrambled postmodern Dylan Thomas.

Publishers Weekly

Previous review quote:  Paquin knows how to enter language and walk in it, so that his experience seems remarkably universal.

Alexis Smith
Tarpaulin Sky