Each Breath I Cannot Hold may be obtained from your local
bookstore or from on-line vendors such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
BUY HERE
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Wind Publications
600 Overbrook Drive
Nicholasville, KY 40356
books@windpub.com
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“In George Eklund's Each Breath I Cannot Hold, our soul is on the line in the poems, ready to collapse at any moment and flare transcendent the next: ‘Every breath is an apocalypse / If only we could speak of it.’ This book speaks it. The poems are ‘jewels of the blood’ -- are live, mending bodies in which we discover how ‘The mind makes itself in a shattering light’ and where ‘Grief is a breathing language.’ It's a language that makes a terrifying path of certain joy in the dark: ‘In the gruel of the spine a choir makes its journey.’ And it's a music that beats the honey out of you with turns of deprivation and
gloria in excelsis — ‘light made softer in its thievery’ and the ‘glitter of the arsonist’s tears.’ All the poems are as unflinching as that line, and so make you brave in the face of their revelation; you are ‘destroyed so light might never end.’” — Garrett Daugherty, Editor and Publisher of
Crazyhorse
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The elements of George Eklund's
poems come together in the mind of the reader to weave a spell,
its magic lying not so much in what is said but in the mystery
of what is not. These poems have an original and elemental
quality — metaphor used not to tell a story, but to create a
mood or a fertile state of mind in which the story blooms a
priori. Eklund gives us the gift of fresh revelation with
each reading of a poem — that's what poetry should do.
— Charlie Hughes
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From the Book —
The Lovers
They are walking into the woods after love making,
Down to the creek in the gray of the cold front.
Their country is at war; they are made
Silent in their muscular grief.
They are concepts of nudity yearning to be remembered.
In their last spasm a desert city burned,
The explosions nearly soft on distant televisions.
The room they have left
Fades in its chained light.
Around them the western world
Settles down to Sunday brunch.
The talk is of local perversion
And a bill that passed in the state senate.
The lovers keep walking
Into the smell of stone-washed water
Beneath burning castles of leaves.
They pass an overgrown corn field some ghost planted,
Some boy came home out of his desert corpse.
The few words between them pass like fractions
In the rubrics of the insane.
They are crossing the creek
In the robes of their fidelity.
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