Leon Rooke's Rank Songbirds delves into the drama and humour of love and desire, politics and the passing of time, celebrating humanity's resilience and its inherent frailty.
About the Book
‘Tonight / I’ll serenade you / With kisses / Modestly dressed...’
In Rank Songbirds, Leon Rooke deploys his playful wit and slantwise perspective to explore the joys and the burdens, the hilarities and the surprises of life in its absurd, charming, tragic minutiae.
These are poems that revel in foibles, saucy verbal sparring and the possibilities of artistic expression while ever mindful of the fallibility of humanity, its voracious appetites, its complicit silences, its convulsive politics. And though it may be that ‘Those angels serenading us through / Hazardous night were rank songbirds chirping away / Mindless of hawks zooming overhead,’ these poems remind us that today is not to be confused with last week’s curse, that freedom is getting the high notes right and that, in a pinch, one might ‘apply love’s bandage to the shiftless heart / This minute pooling debris about your feet.’
Read an Excerpt
2
My beloved cannot, may not, will not execute
The unworthy act hold
Her pretty feet to the fire set
Entire cities ablaze prod
Her with the ironmonger’s hot poker,
Withhold lemonade, shout a vigilante’s heated threat
She will in no way tolerate the unworthy act though thieves waylay her,
Waters be shaken by hurricane,
Collapse of the very streets on which her feet set down.
Here, she says, hold my hand
Say me no platitudes
Lower no empty bucket
Into my well
Simultaneously don’t be suckered by a girl’s soft speech flush
Of rosy cheek flash
Of leeward limb
The bonny disposition of starlets on parade look:
Me once a mere old-fashioned girl faint of heart, grace, and intellect see
How pigeon-toed and halting my every step, an imbecile child stirred
To tearful disarray by any shadow haunting floor or wall an unkind word
Found the woman you are said to love shivering
Through night’s repast Fathom me
Now chewing to the bone
These very fingernails, my ratcheting sobs was
That only yesterday?
About the Author
Leon Rooke is an international reveller, skirt-chaser and former wastrel whose celebrated oeuvre may have been ghosted by his wicked half-sister, or maybe his mother, or an eighteenth-century ‘Keeper of the Lamps’. But not this one. We may wonder why. Also, he’s a raffish [ed. note: charming] bum.
For more information please visit the Author’s website »
You Might Also Like
Buy in Print
To get this book in print, order from your favourite indie bookseller, or
buy online from our distributor, UTP »
Print ISBN: 9780889844483
eBook ISBN: 9780889844490