Falling to Earth

Winner of the 4th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

Tom Hansen's Falling to Earth was selected by judge Molly Peacock from over 900 entries to BOA's 4th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize contest. Peacock writes in her introduction, " A bemused, stoop-shouldered figure who is more than a mere speaker - let's call him a protagonist - stalks the poems of Falling to Earth . With candor and an almost grandiose simplicity, Hansen describes the limitations of his middle-aged body and, in so doing, the limitations of his enterprise in mid-life: the gracelessness of survival. Falling to Earth is the journey of a vibrant soul refreshing itself poem by poem."

Systole, Diastole

In folders in files in offices
in the county courthouse in town
are pieces of paper on which we have plotted
to parcel this land among us:
Johnston and Shepard and Pentel and Williams
          and Gajdan and Darrow
                    and Hansen.
My ranch. My timberland. Mine.

Deer and elk and mountain lion
and bobcat and coyote and eagle and hawk,
          attendant spirits,
                    mere blood and bone,
roam this rock-ribbed hinterland
          bristling with ponderous pines
or swim shifting currents above it.
Brookies and browns and rainbows hover
in icy streams plowing through it.

And one little ember of consciousness,
          quietly fading to ash,
glides down deer trails and eases through fences
and stumbles upon a crime scene or altar.
A passionate congregation of flies
worships a carcass of wolf with no eyes.
A moldering log dreams itself green,
          far out at sea and sinking.

©BOA Editions, Ltd 2006

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Price: $14.95