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Sills gathers together poems from four of O'Brien's early books and combines them with later work, forming a selection from 1960-1999. O'Brien writes, "The poems dance their dance of stillness and motion. The issue is a quiet, patterned music, animated, disciplined, ecstatic; not closure, but recognition."
List of contents
- The Falls
- The Room
- Summer
- During Sickness
- Persephone
- Sunday
- Window
- Waking
- "the child's secret, who you sit down next to"
- "from mayday to solstice, parades"
- Skin
- Crossing
- Another Sunday
- Postcard
- Jean Arp
- Deathmask: Heine
- Swan
- "I come out, see my shadow, go back to sleep"
- For Ruth
- "Eurydice, forget me not"
- "nullity is cinelinear, the calliopes of surrealism"
- Half Moon
- The Note
- Early March
- Rimbaud
- Brooklyn
- "reason & evening: a phonebooth"
- "a cage of need, a dream"
- "between babytalk & 'the Odyssey of Geist'"
- "A dream of reason calm as a garden"
- "Ophelia's ghost, like an unimproved road"
- After a Cadence of Hart Crane
- In Fever
- Jackstraws
- Perceptual Difficulties
- song & image
- Marcel Duchamp
- Four Choruses
- The Days
- Postcards from Nambe
- East Branch
- Three California Poems
- Finistere
- "The song the torso sings"
- Sundown
- Cassis
- The Passenger
- The Days, Again
- Earring
- "The split seed-pods of the grass"
- "Monk had his Baroness like Rilke"
- "The world and its likeness"
- Four Places
- "the dandy you pass in the intersection"
- The Terms
- The Loom
- In the Elevator
- Damage
- Radio
- Echocardiogram
- Lives of the Saints
- A Translation
- Chambers Street
- Amulet
- Angels
- Memory
- From an Anthology
- Formals & Bridals
- 4 Songs
- Rain
- Stones
- Rubric
- Achill Island
- Winter
- At Schoodic
- 14 Songs
- A Pillow-Book
- The Instructions
- Arthur Dove
- In Memory of Frank Kuenstler
- For Iso & Susan
- Trains Going By
- Late August
- Applecross
- A Quarry
- Stations
- "Horses standing in rain"
About the author
Michael O'Brien is an actor, radio presenter and writer from the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia.
