Luminous in the Owl’’s Rib

In this collection of poetry, Luminous in the Owl’s Rib, former Indiana Poet Laureate, George Kalamaras, continues his ongoing project of ＂seeing one in the other＂-poems that explore the interface of the human and natural world. Following his Surrealist forebears, Kalamaras explores the complexity of language, with startling images and juxtapositions, as a vehicle for visionary poetics. Writing a series of poems for musicians (including some of his favorite jazz greats), along with a several elegies for poets dear to him, Kalamaras explores late-night moments of a generative solitude that leave the realms of loneliness, becoming expansive and interconnected. These poems seek to connect our human impulses to the realms of the spiritual and the discursive. In the process, the poems honor the varieties of human and animal experience-mammals, marsupials, and the insect world, even probing the intelligence and ＂vision＂ that lie at the heart of molecules. The luminosity in the owl-the profundity of the numinous-Kalamaras shows us, lies inside the owl, even within the intimate space of a rib.

SAMPLE:

The Sound Behind Water

People are always asking, Which house is this?

They open a door, and my chest sprouts sparrows

They close a window as an avocado dirts to seed

They look for the outline of a tree in fog

It is barely there, behind their water

Beneath the sky

Inside the grass

Is a shape that moves like an eel

In the marsh of your eyes

I see myself struggling for sound

Like a hermit who, even after years of silence,

Can’t forget his own name

We are struck to the earth like a bar of scented soap

An egret who has grown an extra leg

I move hesitantly, feeling a larger portion of the world

Weighing less than a ballroom without snow

I float further into myself

Like a clock narrowing as it leaves midnight

Like a thin rug that has taken many years to weave