The Book of Emblems

Matthew LaddPublication: October 19th, 2010

£8.99

Winner of the 5th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Foreword by the judge, Rosanna Warren

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.

paperback  
ISBN: 978-1-904130-43-7 Extent: 80pp Category: Tag:

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)

An interview with Matthew Ladd

To read a two-part interview with Matthew Ladd, please click on the links below:

Interview with Matthew Ladd – Part I

Interview with Matthew Ladd – Part II/

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.

The Waywiser Press

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.

The Waywiser Press

Excerpts

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.

The Waywiser Press

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.

The Waywiser Press

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