By William Gilson
\nISBN 978-0-9928946-6-5
\nPrice \u00a35<\/p>\n
SOLD OUT<\/strong><\/pre>\n<\/p>\n
Bill Gilson is an American from New England who came to live in Cumbria with his young family in 1995. In these utterly distinctive poems he writes of the conflicting emotions of this transition. Conflating the past and present almost seamlessly, here is one man\u2019s attempt to confront the puzzle of how we end up living the lives we do.<\/p>\n
“Gilson places details and relationships in such a way that they transcend the simply biographical.” D.A.Prince in londongrip.<\/p>\n
\nThe farm<\/em><\/h4>\n
A house, recalled
\nfrom my old life in America.
\nIt is spectral now,
\ninvisible to the people
\nwho drive past the new houses
\nalong the Naugatuck-Middlebury line,
\nthe single lane road.
\nCow barn, hay barn, spring house, sheds.
\nThe brook with its swimming hole where
\ncousin Norman cracked his head.
\nOnce, alongside the railroad embankment
\nan Ansonia man buried his murdered wife:
\nBill Fenn, Lennie, Donnie, Uncle Frank
\nwent to watch the cops dig.<\/p>\nOn the steep hillside in back of the cow barn
\nwe back-and-forthed with the flatbed truck
\nand I rode atop the piled hay
\nthrough the big barn doors.<\/p>\nIn the house on Sundays
\nthe women talked and cooked in the kitchen
\nand in the dark parlor the men
\nwatched football on a 12″ black-and-white RCA.<\/p>\nThe ghosts of my cousins, of my brother and me,
\nrun through the rooms, up and down the stairs,
\nout the front door, into the sunlight.<\/p>\n
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