Perfect Hurt
£7.99
Finalist for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
A father and son climb a mountain together. A woman banishes all color from her house. Lovers pull down a tree to discover the life inside dead, dry bark. An old artist looks back at a century that almost killed him, but one that turned him into the creator he was destined to become. Through their exhilarating techniques, their adamant attachments to art and to nature, their sharp observations and their wry senses of humour, the poems in Perfect Hurt re-imagine suffering and memory as what anchor us to the world – and what render that world, amazingly, worth surviving.
Perfect Hurt
“‘There is no self without artifice,’ Bradford Gray Telford writes in Perfect Hurt, an elegant debut that somehow manages to be both restrained and luscious at once. How can such carefully patterned, structured poems engender this roiling intensity, convey such a sense of careening interiority? ‘A man I loved wanted to die,’ he writes, ‘and come back as a wave whereas I, I / favored a go as that whispering scene / from the Zapruder film, you know, that moment …’ Here is a new voice that arrives as something already achieved: a presence, a consciousness: a made, unmistakeable self.” – Mark Doty
“A speaking dirt-mound; a helpful Clytaemnestra advising Cassandra to ‘Leap before you look’; a self-portrait via descriptions of four trees; a Polish artist’s literal and mental wanderings: Bradford Gray Telford’s Perfect Hurt is a perfectly dizzying collection of tragi-comic reflections on people and places, family and friends, life and art, suffering and love – one that dazzles too with its formal mastery, its gorgeous descriptive textures, and its effortless blend of wit and pathos.” – Rachel Wetzsteon
“One could easily lose oneself in the pleasures of this book – an intellect exulting in its scope, a melodious voice testing the limits of its range – but to yield to this temptation would be to miss the depths that reward more sustained attention. A charismatic and impressive debut.” – Monica Youn
Reviews of Perfect Hurt
Wisconsin Bookwatch, October 2009
“Life is not pain, but how one deals with that pain. Perfect Hurt is a collection of poetry from Bradford Gray Telford, using his verse to discuss the world and how the hardships make it a world worth living in. [It] is a thoughtful poetry read, recommended.
for Darin Ciccotelli
We went to the Marinsky on an evening in late June.
Our box hung high above the pit, an expectation.
The conductor bowed. The English horn spoke Russian.
Curtain up on Chinese lantern, Chinese moon.
*
I wondered about the cherubs, what had they seen?
Had they tired in the plaster, their paint and gilt wings?
What bores an angel more – violence or beauty?
Why bother when the program changes nightly?
*
I go to the theatre to forget I’m at the theatre.
I go to the book to forget about the shelf.
I go home to remember I’m a stranger.
I go to you. Remember me. Forget myself.
*
We didn’t know what we were seeing.
The chorus sang of nature. A shepherd mentioned grace.
Bulbs flickered in the wings – sheet lightening.
Gobo net the stage in gold-green lace.
*
The actors churned these foam-core scrolls.
They looked like deco-fenders. They were supposed to be waves.
Theatre happens in the brain’s soft coils.
They behave the way a churning sea behaves.
*
I was nine – a thirty minute Czech operetta.
Children, wolves, a storm, a stalled train.
The children wanted out, the wolves wanted better
than the wind and the snow and the Czech refrain.
*
I go to the theatre the way Frost went to the woods.
Often I don’t like it. But I do feel better.
I work for the theatre the way Rilke worked for Rodin
what with his cold and attitude and thin, bad sweater.
*
The shepherd wanted nothing – that’s his job.
The kingdom wanted peace. The drunkard out of jail.
The set designer: more gold, more silver foil.
The emperor would catch the nightingale.
*
Art may be a meeting between a man and his work.
Once there he speaks – he plumbs the heart of “is.”
A moon will glow. A deer will learn to walk.
There is no self without artifice.
The Waywiser Press
Last Song
Los Angeles, 1993
We are nothing but the stories that we tell.
We are all the people that we’ll never know.
We are oceans, echoed in a shell.
We are the barren harvests that we sow.
You’d think that I’d be sick of all these saws
by now. I am. But if I had my druthers
I would die to grow sick of more because
we’re all dying – and some faster than others.
Our heaven is here, our hell is here, and love –
the bleeding angel of no soul – is here.
It flaps its broken wing, it hangs above
our ground, it whispers in our grave’s dirt ear
one name that we forget before it rolls, dives
vanishing beneath the soil of our lives.
The Waywiser Press
Excerpts
At the Theatre
for Darin Ciccotelli
We went to the Marinsky on an evening in late June.
Our box hung high above the pit, an expectation.
The conductor bowed. The English horn spoke Russian.
Curtain up on Chinese lantern, Chinese moon.
*
I wondered about the cherubs, what had they seen?
Had they tired in the plaster, their paint and gilt wings?
What bores an angel more – violence or beauty?
Why bother when the program changes nightly?
*
I go to the theatre to forget I’m at the theatre.
I go to the book to forget about the shelf.
I go home to remember I’m a stranger.
I go to you. Remember me. Forget myself.
*
We didn’t know what we were seeing.
The chorus sang of nature. A shepherd mentioned grace.
Bulbs flickered in the wings – sheet lightening.
Gobo net the stage in gold-green lace.
*
The actors churned these foam-core scrolls.
They looked like deco-fenders. They were supposed to be waves.
Theatre happens in the brain’s soft coils.
They behave the way a churning sea behaves.
*
I was nine – a thirty minute Czech operetta.
Children, wolves, a storm, a stalled train.
The children wanted out, the wolves wanted better
than the wind and the snow and the Czech refrain.
*
I go to the theatre the way Frost went to the woods.
Often I don’t like it. But I do feel better.
I work for the theatre the way Rilke worked for Rodin
what with his cold and attitude and thin, bad sweater.
*
The shepherd wanted nothing – that’s his job.
The kingdom wanted peace. The drunkard out of jail.
The set designer: more gold, more silver foil.
The emperor would catch the nightingale.
*
Art may be a meeting between a man and his work.
Once there he speaks – he plumbs the heart of “is.”
A moon will glow. A deer will learn to walk.
There is no self without artifice.
The Waywiser Press
Last Song
Los Angeles, 1993
We are nothing but the stories that we tell.
We are all the people that we’ll never know.
We are oceans, echoed in a shell.
We are the barren harvests that we sow.
You’d think that I’d be sick of all these saws
by now. I am. But if I had my druthers
I would die to grow sick of more because
we’re all dying – and some faster than others.
Our heaven is here, our hell is here, and love –
the bleeding angel of no soul – is here.
It flaps its broken wing, it hangs above
our ground, it whispers in our grave’s dirt ear
one name that we forget before it rolls, dives
vanishing beneath the soil of our lives.
The Waywiser Press
