Linda Bierds
“Bone Cockerel: Norman Cross Prisoner-of-War Camp, England”
The Hardy Tree
In Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid there is one poem in a style developed by Ondaatje as he says in the Afterword to the 2008 edition “I attempted everything. I took a stanza and wrote it backwards and in one case I kept the result”. Kuldip Gill picks up the form and makes it her own in one of the poems in Valley Sutra. Linda Bierds may have come across the form independently. There is no entry for “mirror poem” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. If the form becomes more popular there just might be an entry in future editions.
Here then is an aperçu of Bierds’s poem:
Any year in any tilting hemisphere,
any set of bones, split and polished, gathered
from the cooking pots… But I am —
this hour — here, he wrote, my art a single shape lifted
from whatever squealed or snarled or lowed across
war’s holding pen. Just touch and feathered bones hatched
into a bird, a set of wings, a textured silence throughout
[…][…]
into a bird, a set of wings, a textured silence throughout
war’s holding pen. Just touch and feathered bones hatched
from whatever squealed or snarled or lowed across
this hour. Here, he wrote, my art a single shape lifted
from the cooking pots… But I am
any set of bones, split and polished, gathered
any year in any tilting hemisphere.
BTW “reverse order” isn’t in the Princeton Encyclopedia either. Our examples could at a stretch be “antimetabole”.
And so for day 2663
29.03.2014