Foreword by Rosanna Warren
(Judge of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2009)

80 pp,  ISBN: 978-1904130-43-7, £8.99 (paperback only),  
Publication, 19 October 2010

Post-free for on-line credit/debit card orders

I wish to order this book

 

A note about The Book of Emblems The Book of Emblems takes its title from the devotional genre, popular throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, whose allegorical illustrations were meant to focus the mind on the divine. Using a variety of narrative voices, a taut lyricism, and an array of imageries culled from the author's travels in the United States and abroad, this volume celebrates the mind's aspiration to a deeper understanding of its own mysteries: the literary and visual arts, sexuality, familial love, and the dark, connective wonder of death. The collection heralds the arrival of remarkable new voice. he judge’s foreword

A note on Matthew Ladd Matthew Ladd was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Texas Panhandle. After completing his undergraduate work in West Texas, he read for the MPhil in Divinity at the University of Cambridge, submitting a master’s thesis on Kierkegaard and German Idealism. In 2006 he received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Paris Review, Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly and Antioch Review. He has also written criticism for the American Scholar, The Humanist and the Threepenny Review, among other publications, and he writes an annual poetry review for West Branch, the literary journal of Bucknell University. He currently lives in New York.

Praise for The Book of Emblems “The quality of Ladd's seeing, as much as his voicing, guarantees his staying power. He glances into the nature of things ... With The Book of Emblems, a new poet steps out into the public square, by turns dashing, modest, canny, stylish, whimsical, and stern ... [T]here is no telling where Ladd’s many gifts will lead him. The horizon is wide.” – Rosanna Warren (from the foreword)

From The Book of Emblems The Animal Kingdom   I despise the swallows that nest in my chimney. For company, I prefer potato beetles: comic bunglers with liver-spotted shells picking along the doorscreen on soft hooked feet. I honor their approach to health and mortality. When the swallows crush them, they die happy. My name hangs from a hook in my father’s study. I ride my bicycle through a rain-slick city where nothing is ugly, awful, or jaw-shattering. My friends, this world, I see it is changing. Our parents age like foods under heat-lamps; a clicking announces itself, sickness. The soft cameras that nourished us are yawning and putting on their velvet caps. We seek order, find only dereliction. Out of the bedsheet, a brown spider finds it loves the feel of a cold human hand. It needs no language for loving this way, no staying power. Only an eye for marking what others would ignore: a crevice, a cry, a hemisphere. Klintholm Havn Denmark I have watched the teenagers late at night, crowding on the rotted wharves and in the oystershell alcoves of the jetties, smoking vanilla cigarettes, exhausting their lighters. When I pass by, they blink at me like mute swans. Tonight, a man is silencing the lamps along the harbor one by one, with a long steel pole. He walks along the lip of the sea-wall like an anachronism. Behind him, the waves bare their backs and melt into foam. There is no question of time in this place. There are only black coffee and oranges, fried herring which neither you nor I can bring ourselves to eat, and the diminishing of hopes that, once, I nursed for us in this life or another. ©