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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-57131-428-4
Pages: 96
Publish Date: February 2007
Genre: Poetry
Music for Landing Planes By
Poems
BY Éireann Lorsung
Telescoping ideas and images in an astonishing variety of forms, Éireann Lorsung honors the makers, methods, and materials embodied in daily objects. From the copper plate of an Intaglio print to the patched muslin form of a dressmaker’s mannequin to the maddered boy taking shape on a loom, the ephemeral becomes eternal in these poems. Combining art and artifacts to create verse that is uniquely modern, Lorsung has invented an entirely original lexicon.
Nothing touches like tan velvet touches
the palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives
without taking?–Doesn’t exist. Sayyou forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece
uncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel
of charmeuse lines your sleep. You’ve lostwhat there was before pins & needles, sound
a scissors makes through cloth on a hardwood floor,
thick waist of the dressmaker’s dummy. Don’t tell meany more. Without Burano lace, without cinnabar
strung on a cuff, shantung and satin and netting and swiss:
no rich man, no camel, no needle’s threatening eye.
—from “Dressmaker”
“In this amazing first book, Éireann Lorsung enters deeply into the everyday–only to emerge awestruck, open and generous. In her hands both the world and the word are transformed into something radiant.”
—Nick Flynn“Éireann Lorsung's debut volume, Music for Landing Planes By, is a young woman’s love song to the planet. Images flock from a vivid pastoral world, uncarded fleece, wrens in thatch, chaff, lathe and hasp, joining the speaker in her effort to stitch prayer and dream, city and country, into one shimmering fabric of ardor."
—Leslie Adrienne Miller
