A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood
Poems
Title Details
Pages: 80
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 03/15/2010
ISBN: 9-780-8203-3474-5
List Price: $20.95
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A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood
Poems
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- Description
- Reviews
Raised on a family farm in the Pacific Northwest, Allen Braden has deep connections to rural life. Even at its most lyrical, his language evokes the local dialect of the West, his West. These poems, balancing elegy and affirmation, measure human and animal relationships with “brute geometry” in order to calculate the damage we require of ourselves.
Returning to variations of a sonnet titled “Taboo against the Word Beauty,” Braden relentlessly pursues the possibility of naming the beautiful without ignoring what has so often and so widely been destroyed by human hands.
The rich textures of many lines and passages here on such themes as nature and work (specifically, farm work) are, frankly, breathtaking.
—B. H. Fairchild, author of Usher: Poems
Braden weaves a graceful and philosophical web in which the ineffable and the inevitable are fatally connected. Say desire is the presence of absent reality, then beauty becomes the absence, orbed here by a sequence of sonnets, a sequence of taboos so compelling that a reader cannot help but be seduced by the brilliant symmetry, the Keatsian capability of this poet’s meditation.
—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature
—Literary Laundry
Braden may flaunt his poetic tricks, yet he is equally comfortable within the narrative moment’s realism. Reading him is akin to knowing a magician’s method while still being pleasantly surprised by the beauty of his results.
—Nick Ripatrazone, Prairie Schooner
