Lucas Smith



Tlatelolco

Where the market met the church and powdered stones reminisce together, the visible still sits with time on its blood, this hoary tropical day where the sign proclaims Cuauhtemoc fell to Jesus Christ on such and such a recent day. …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Review Short: Les Murray’s On Bunyah

The doggedly metropolitan Frank O’Hara wrote in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’: ‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.’

In the introduction to On Bunyah, a career-spanning collection of poems about his home township 300 clicks north of Sydney, the stubbornly pastoral Les Murray writes, ‘this book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.’

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Working in the Summering Senior Partner’s Office

Working in the summering senior partner’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue reminds me of the inferior debts of kitsch, those sand-storm debts of Timbuktu and the pickled herring jar where we matured that wish. You don’t pay for saunas in DC …

Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT | Tagged

The Lungfishes Birthday, Steinhart Aquarium, San Francisco

Two wise blue-eyed cigars arrived this day in nineteen-nineteen with little grins on faces and now like languorous jet- liners they retrace the entire world, from branch to waving vallisneria— iridescent Australia— in ninety-one years they have not touched the …

Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC | Tagged