The Eclipses

Winner of the 3rd Anuual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

David Woo's The Eclipses was selected by judge Michael S. Harper from over 700 manuscripts as winner of the 2003 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize contest. The artful remembrances of this first collection weave together memory, woe, mourning and, ultimately, transcendence in luminous detail. Ancestors, both literary and blood, are called forth as Woo struggles beyond his mother's death toward his own heart-intelligent truths. "David Woo's first book of poems is eloquent, poignant, superbly wrought. Like the major poet Henri Cole, Woo has achieved a fresh, highly individual imaginative language in the American modes of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. The title poem and the beautiful transposition of Hofmannsthal in "Ballad of Infinite Forgetfulness" have an aura of permanence about them."--Harold Bloom

The Eye

After-echo of sirens, a sliding-glass door, curtains
parting, the dark-green room with the white bed,
the tiny spot of blood on the useless tube
in her throat. Eyes closed; we never closed them
for her. “Sleep is sleep,” she’d scoff, which meant
death was not a dozing lamb. And yet I opened
one lid to expose a dead eye, empty and glassen
as the sweet beast’s gaze. I wanted one last look in,
but it didn’t stay open. Something, not my touch,
closed it for her again, something, mere inertia,
reflex of the orbicular oculi, something that defied
the solace of metaphor, the succor of half-truths
she taught us to resist, like the words I uttered
to console my father: “She wants to stay asleep.”

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2005

Available editions:
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Paperback ISBN: 1-929918-61-5
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: April 2005