T. Zachary Cotler

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Biographical note:  T. Zachary Cotler’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, The Wolf, and other journals in the US and UK. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Amy Clampitt Residency Award and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Djerassi Foundation. He is a founding editor of The Winter Anthology, www.winteranthology.com. This is his first book of poems.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718207
ISBN:  9781844718207
Author:  T. Zachary Cotler
Title:  House with a Dark Sky Roof
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Mar-11
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  House with a Dark Sky Roof stands nearly dead-center between the traditional and experimental schools of the 20th century. The poems are unashamedly intellectual, often complex, yet never ungenerous, never unnecessarily obscure. This is the debut of one of the most ambitious and original emerging writers in the English language.

Main description:  House with a Dark Sky Roof stands nearly dead-center between the traditional and experimental schools of the 20th century. Unlike so much 21st century poetry by younger Americans that might be described this way, this book evidences, on a line by line level, a truly original voice, unbeholden to Ashbery, O’Hara, and the other poets too often emulated by graduates of the American creative writing programs.

The poems in House with a Dark Sky Roof are unashamedly intellectual, often complex, yet never ungenerous, never unnecessarily obscure. Though these poems are attached to the land, they are never provincial, travelling from New York to Mexico to London to the Karuk reservation in Northern California to Slovenia to ancient Greece and the outer solar system.

Table of contents:
Contents
First Thaw
Threshold Clouds
Black Crosses
Your Brother in the Trees
I Thought I Saw You Again Today
Passat
The Red Grape
Lucifer
Fire Road
Karuk Nation
Hard Copies
Feast of Weeks
Second Thaw
Way to the Wedding
We Had a Word for the Two of Us
What Are You?
Medal of Honor
Dying in the Waysong Living
Troubadour
Curing Death
Life on Europa
I Come to Bury Caesar
At a Chapel of the Jesuits
Tahnee
Beautiful without Money
Open Window
In Gorika
Flicker
Behind the Prytaneum
House with a Dark Sky Roof
10,000th Bad Ithaca Dream
Islands
Quintet at Cafe Objet du Ciel Profond
Promethean Factors Engineering
At Keats Grove, Hampstead
Broken Stair
Haku
Calls
The Wild Clarifying
Elsewhere
John Golden’s Sign
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Lucifer

Behind the house
of the dead naturalist,
I stoop over a fist-sized
amber blob and drive
a stick into it and sniff
the sampling, odorless.
So unfamiliar, this
substance. Maybe bloody
feces of a sudden oak
death dryad. She didn’t
suffer much; I heard her;
I was sleeping. Under it,
a carapaced black worm
tightens in the light.
I flip the worm
onto the flipped blob,
and the worm feigns
death. I gently sway,
my shadow aimed east.
A great armored wheel
grinds wood and books
to weird flour in my brain.

Unpublished endorsement:  What strikes me most in Cotler’s poems is their rich and dense verbal music. As Housman and Auden, among others, have pointed out, poetry is not what is said (which is shared with all sorts of other verbal discourses) but a way of saying, and the way of Cotler’s saying is compelling and hypnotic. And yet the music is not detached from the fact; the poems’ love for the weight and heft and tune of their words is matched by their love for the particulars with which they are replete to overflow: Cotler has taken to heart Keats’ admonition to load every rift with ore.

Reginald Shepherd