Mount Soledad - Softcover

Polkinhorn, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880516195 ISBN 13: 9781880516195

Publisher: Left Hand Books, 1996

Synopsis

Poetry. In MOUNT SOLEDAD Harry Polkinhorn uses his ill-fated romance with a Cuban-American woman to illuminate the themes of love and money, employing in the opening pages the conceits associated with the language of love before shifting these rhetorical tropes into a kind of vacillating syntax. Lines paraphrasing the poetry of medieval troubadours circulate like undead currency in a whirlwind of non sequiturs: "fading away perhaps into an explosion of resemblances her voice disconnected by winds of a disappearing language unhooked into fog, into people's eyes that have seen water and love going away bird wings incautious negatives"

About this title

About the Author:

Harry Polkinhorn is a psychoanalyst, professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, and director of SDSU Press. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently DEMOS ONEIRON (Junction Press, 2011) and The Circle of Willis (Ex Press, 2010); five works of fiction, including Trauma (Ex Press, 2010); ten volumes of translations; and two collections of visual poetry, including Bridges of Skin Money (Xexoxial Editions, 2008). Among the sixteen books he has edited or co-edited are ACROSS THE LINE/AL OTRO LADO: THE POETRY OF BAJA CALIFORNIA (Junction Press, 2002), with Mark Weiss; and CALÓ: A DICTIONARY OF SPANISH BARRIO AND BORDER SLANG (Junction Press, 2011), with Alfredo Velasco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

here in ancient Egypt just a few more dollars I'm reconstructing her very poorly and completely in the standard conventions of my place and time with occult force of self-delusion necessary only because of a raw absence as I run back and forth through my memories of kisses and soft words that populated the air as if hieratic when considered from this remove a monument to stasis because our paths diverged and in spite of all the contrary claims she was not in charge of her fate (not in that way) so something died albeit unwillingly of course and of these bestial deaths we are made according to the blueprint of some ill being who delights in suffering then I took it upon myself to refuse their averages and graph paper preferring her sporadic statements even if graven in insubstantial stone to achieve a special kind of waiting like old hands hauling water only to have to face some unpredictable catastrophe that comes with the territory which I had hoped to leave behind because such is the nature of hope structural to my feeling about her taken up as two-dimensional, hieroglyphic as her profile's ultimate clean line I've lost the code for deciphering but she figures otherwise (of only this am I certain) having been singed and fried not to be ignored our meager yield after half a lifetime of really grave mistakes you learn humility and can finally be grateful for food and drink and the chance to help someone (anyone) across expanses of depopulated history at my feet the Amazon river basin her vague image floating just beyond reach just like in the old-time movies of my childhood in a Calexico nobody here has ever even heard of with that odd concentration that appears lax I resume my self-appointed labor of love reeling in the results such as they may be because whatever the river speaks will be my only grist and for her only the best--

About this edition

• Publisher: Left Hand Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1880516195
• ISBN 13: 9781880516195
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100