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    Geoffrey Gatza
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    These are thoughtful, warmly felt poems. In the haunting, powerful, unforgettable elegy “Like Hector,” the gardener William Gratwick orders his funeral: hitch his body to a carriage and drag it around the sixty acres of his gardens through the pasture and by the hedge and past the pond and oaks and sycamores -- to mark his turf and to be marked by it, and “then toss my stained bones / out beside the shed and // let the gray fox gnaw me when I’m dead.” —Irving Feldman I recently read, The Solace of Islands, by Ansie Baird, student of John Logan in the 1970s and active Buffalo poet for the last 30 plus years. I found her imagery striking. The wave of the hand in her poem “En Route to Algeciras” has hold in my mind. It will not exit. These days, after many years of reading, this is what I hope to find in poetry. The Solace of Islands is focused and deals thematically with various forms of loss, aging and inevitable death, death and abandonment. Aroused, these intense and relentless feelings in the poems are full and deep and focused on the human condition at these peak moments, moments we all inevitably confront. Each poem is wrought intellectually and emotionally. The poet is master of her craft and poetic magic manifests in each poem. The magic is all the music of the poetry. The weaving of the words is beautiful. Without question the theme of this poetry is solemn but there are sparks of humor and tenderness that light the way through the musical landscape. An island is, of course, an enclosed space, a protected place, for poet Ansie Baird the place of the very human heart. —Michael Basinski Although the title poem of this collection presents her overlooking the Aegean Sea, and the last poem leaves her hiking a murky trail at daybreak, Ansie Baird’s poems tend to congregate around her house and garden in the heart of Buffalo, like hawks and starlings on the roof, chrysanthemums in the garden, house ghosts stealing out the front door, light slanting into the attic cranny or basement nook. Whether she is listening to her father’s wordplay or her mother’s laughter, chiding her contrary sister or her distant husband, sending billets doux to a lover or elegies to departed friends, she finds herself at home: the house of poetry provides permanence in flux, sheltering, delimiting, concealing. But the windows are open and the back yard is full of trees: so she also finds herself at home in the world. —Emily Grosholz “Scanning the dark” is often what Ansie Baird is doing in this rich new collection of poems that open into emotional terrain in which her only compass is a mix of intelligence, clear-sightedness, and the power of exact articulation. Happily for her readers, the dark is lightened by her own highly developed, often acerbic, sense of irony, her quickness of wit. These new poems chart a lifetime’s emotional journey–open to pathos, humor, and above all compassionate understanding. Whether she’s delicately limning a complicated love affair; recalling complicated family relationships (father “an old rogue, his laugh explosive;” unhappy mother (but “thank god she could make her children laugh”); detecting the emotional vibrations of ordinary actions (“the broken/ screen door slamming in the dawn”); or simply, in unsentimental elegies, celebrating the lives of beloved friends (“How real people evaporate into thin air”), what strikes me again and again is the inimitable authenticity of her voice, and the resilience of a spirit finding the right words--so truly personal feelings are neither self-indulgent nor self-regarding. “Holding On” is the title of one of her poems, but the phrase grounds a great many of them, and the emotional temper they embody--the radical honesty they enact in sections that take a close view and a loving but undeceived hold on Love, Family, Marriage, Divorce, Death, even Soul and Spirit, even Art itself. In all of them she walks her elected territory with sure formal steps,

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    These are thoughtful, warmly felt poems. In the haunting, powerful, unforgettable elegy “Like Hector,” the gardener William Gratwick orders his funeral: hitch his body to a carriage and drag it around the sixty acres of his gardens through the pasture and by the hedge and past the pond and oaks and sycamores -- to mark his turf and to be marked by it, and “then toss my stained bones / out beside the shed and // let the gray fox gnaw me when I’m dead.” —Irving Feldman I recently read, The Solace of Islands, by Ansie Baird, student of John Logan in the 1970s and active Buffalo poet for the last 30 plus years. I found her imagery striking. The wave of the hand in her poem “En Route to Algeciras” has hold in my mind. It will not exit. These days, after many years of reading, this is what I hope to find in poetry. The Solace of Islands is focused and deals thematically with various forms of loss, aging and inevitable death, death and abandonment. Aroused, these intense and relentless feelings in the poems are full and deep and focused on the human condition at these peak moments, moments we all inevitably confront. Each poem is wrought intellectually and emotionally. The poet is master of her craft and poetic magic manifests in each poem. The magic is all the music of the poetry. The weaving of the words is beautiful. Without question the theme of this poetry is solemn but there are sparks of humor and tenderness that light the way through the musical landscape. An island is, of course, an enclosed space, a protected place, for poet Ansie Baird the place of the very human heart. —Michael Basinski Although the title poem of this collection presents her overlooking the Aegean Sea, and the last poem leaves her hiking a murky trail at daybreak, Ansie Baird’s poems tend to congregate around her house and garden in the heart of Buffalo, like hawks and starlings on the roof, chrysanthemums in the garden, house ghosts stealing out the front door, light slanting into the attic cranny or basement nook. Whether she is listening to her father’s wordplay or her mother’s laughter, chiding her contrary sister or her distant husband, sending billets doux to a lover or elegies to departed friends, she finds herself at home: the house of poetry provides permanence in flux, sheltering, delimiting, concealing. But the windows are open and the back yard is full of trees: so she also finds herself at home in the world. —Emily Grosholz “Scanning the dark” is often what Ansie Baird is doing in this rich new collection of poems that open into emotional terrain in which her only compass is a mix of intelligence, clear-sightedness, and the power of exact articulation. Happily for her readers, the dark is lightened by her own highly developed, often acerbic, sense of irony, her quickness of wit. These new poems chart a lifetime’s emotional journey–open to pathos, humor, and above all compassionate understanding. Whether she’s delicately limning a complicated love affair; recalling complicated family relationships (father “an old rogue, his laugh explosive;” unhappy mother (but “thank god she could make her children laugh”); detecting the emotional vibrations of ordinary actions (“the broken/ screen door slamming in the dawn”); or simply, in unsentimental elegies, celebrating the lives of beloved friends (“How real people evaporate into thin air”), what strikes me again and again is the inimitable authenticity of her voice, and the resilience of a spirit finding the right words--so truly personal feelings are neither self-indulgent nor self-regarding. “Holding On” is the title of one of her poems, but the phrase grounds a great many of them, and the emotional temper they embody--the radical honesty they enact in sections that take a close view and a loving but undeceived hold on Love, Family, Marriage, Divorce, Death, even Soul and Spirit, even Art itself. In all of them she walks her elected territory with sure formal steps,

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    The Solace of Islands by Ansie Baird Book Preview

    Uploaded by

    Geoffrey Gatza
    These are thoughtful, warmly felt poems. In the haunting, powerful, unforgettable elegy “Like Hector,” the gardener William Gratwick orders his funeral: hitch his body to a carriage and drag it around the sixty acres of his gardens through the pasture and by the hedge and past the pond and oaks and sycamores -- to mark his turf and to be marked by it, and “then toss my stained bones / out beside the shed and // let the gray fox gnaw me when I’m dead.” —Irving Feldman I recently read, The Solace of Islands, by Ansie Baird, student of John Logan in the 1970s and active Buffalo poet for the last 30 plus years. I found her imagery striking. The wave of the hand in her poem “En Route to Algeciras” has hold in my mind. It will not exit. These days, after many years of reading, this is what I hope to find in poetry. The Solace of Islands is focused and deals thematically with various forms of loss, aging and inevitable death, death and abandonment. Aroused, these intense and relentless feelings in the poems are full and deep and focused on the human condition at these peak moments, moments we all inevitably confront. Each poem is wrought intellectually and emotionally. The poet is master of her craft and poetic magic manifests in each poem. The magic is all the music of the poetry. The weaving of the words is beautiful. Without question the theme of this poetry is solemn but there are sparks of humor and tenderness that light the way through the musical landscape. An island is, of course, an enclosed space, a protected place, for poet Ansie Baird the place of the very human heart. —Michael Basinski Although the title poem of this collection presents her overlooking the Aegean Sea, and the last poem leaves her hiking a murky trail at daybreak, Ansie Baird’s poems tend to congregate around her house and garden in the heart of Buffalo, like hawks and starlings on the roof, chrysanthemums in the garden, house ghosts stealing out the front door, light slanting into the attic cranny or basement nook. Whether she is listening to her father’s wordplay or her mother’s laughter, chiding her contrary sister or her distant husband, sending billets doux to a lover or elegies to departed friends, she finds herself at home: the house of poetry provides permanence in flux, sheltering, delimiting, concealing. But the windows are open and the back yard is full of trees: so she also finds herself at home in the world. —Emily Grosholz “Scanning the dark” is often what Ansie Baird is doing in this rich new collection of poems that open into emotional terrain in which her only compass is a mix of intelligence, clear-sightedness, and the power of exact articulation. Happily for her readers, the dark is lightened by her own highly developed, often acerbic, sense of irony, her quickness of wit. These new poems chart a lifetime’s emotional journey–open to pathos, humor, and above all compassionate understanding. Whether she’s delicately limning a complicated love affair; recalling complicated family relationships (father “an old rogue, his laugh explosive;” unhappy mother (but “thank god she could make her children laugh”); detecting the emotional vibrations of ordinary actions (“the broken/ screen door slamming in the dawn”); or simply, in unsentimental elegies, celebrating the lives of beloved friends (“How real people evaporate into thin air”), what strikes me again and again is the inimitable authenticity of her voice, and the resilience of a spirit finding the right words--so truly personal feelings are neither self-indulgent nor self-regarding. “Holding On” is the title of one of her poems, but the phrase grounds a great many of them, and the emotional temper they embody--the radical honesty they enact in sections that take a close view and a loving but undeceived hold on Love, Family, Marriage, Divorce, Death, even Soul and Spirit, even Art itself. In all of them she walks her elected territory with sure formal steps,

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 16

    THE SOLACE OF ISLANDS

    ANSIE BAIRD

    BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
    Buffalo, New York

    The Solace of Islands


    by Ansie Baird
    Copyright 2016
    Published by BlazeVOX [books]
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
    the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in
    reviews.
    Printed in the United States of America
    Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza
    Cover Art by Beth Munro
    First Edition
    ISBN: 978-1-60964-242-6
    Library of Congress Control Number: 2015958571
    BlazeVOX [books]
    131 Euclid Ave
    Kenmore, NY 14217
    Editor@blazevox.org

    publisher of weird little books

    BlazeVOX [ books ]
    blazevox.org
    21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

    I
    A Drift Of Mergers

    A DRIFT OF MERGERS
    I.
    Breath of my knee
    brow of my wrist
    hip of my throat
    tongue of my bone
    eye of my rib
    ear of my thigh
    lip of my hand
    palm of my heel
    neck of my arm
    tooth of my skin
    mouth of my heart
    thrumming
    II.
    If passion were harmony
    we'd memorize the song
    a frolic of notes
    graceful as spokes
    on the oak railing
    leading upstairs
    but it's not
    it's a plaint
    composed in the basement
    faint moans on the oboe

    v 17

    III.
    Doubt everything
    except the moon
    perpetually changing
    hour by hour
    putting on a new face
    its variations a kind
    of comfortable
    discomfort
    as you wait
    scanning the dark
    IV.
    Water bathe my wounds
    matter mold my clay
    silence slip the sounds
    clattering the day
    window halt the wind
    flaming over skin
    midnight hold my bones
    sheltering within.

    v 18

    BIG BAND
    It was only when he stood up
    in his trim black shirt from among
    the other men in his section, only
    when he separated himself from
    the many players in the brass band,
    placing the saxophone in his mouth,
    sending forth a sound almost as clear
    as the human voice reverberating
    in the attentive air -- it was only then,
    as he stood among the old-timers, strangers
    she had never seen before, that she could not
    take her eyes off his tender, aging face.
    Into the woody mid-day tavern, dim
    despite a flush of outside sunshine,
    she arrived breathless at noon, having
    travelled twelve whole minutes
    to a foreign land here in her familiar town,
    here to behold this player of song,
    this man looking up at her, pitching
    his melodies right in her direction, all the places
    she calls home: leaded glass windows,
    small grassy paths, backyards hidden by hedges.
    That afternoon she found cities within cities,
    carrying her neighborhood around in her arms.

    v 19

    SHOFAR AND THE KITCHEN TABLE


    He was talking about the shofar,
    how the high pitch of the ram's horn
    calling the faithful to prayer or to
    repentance has a kind of ancient
    resonance, its sustained notes
    in sequence sounding something
    like a sob or a wail, linking all
    the living and the dead.
    How it connects melodically
    with the summoning trumpet of
    more recent eras, swooping out over
    gatherings with all its glittering assertion -so that even today, when the band
    begins to play, there's that brave strain.
    And she was half-listening to every
    learned word he uttered, thinking:
    If I lean in a little closer to catch
    the nuances, I could begin
    unbuttoning the cuff of his plaid
    shirt so I could slide my hand up
    his forearm as far as the elbow
    and feel the warm skin beneath
    my searching fingers.
    And how he would let her do that,
    would in fact barely glance up
    from his steaming bowl of supper
    to smile at the intrusion.

    v 20

    And how the almost melodic tone


    of the shofar, heard blaring from
    an ancient hilltop across a great
    distance, and the almost melodic
    stroking of a man's arm, felt across
    any kitchen table, are parts
    of a continuous cycle, linking
    ceremony and our private hearts.

    v 21

    TAKE ONE
    When the camera mounts the stairs,
    it arrives at an ordinary bedroom
    strewn with blue wool blankets
    on a messy bed, a wide shot of
    wide shades wide open
    at three windows, not
    a pulled-down position
    made for embracing.
    Unruly light, busy old sun,
    seems intrusive in such a space.
    Easy enough to fix.
    Yank down the blinds
    so a blue-gray cast
    permits two classical bodies
    to move into each other's sphere.
    Off come the boots, the shoes,
    the thick socks. Stockings flung
    on the floor. Buttons unbuttoned,
    shirts tugged over heads, all
    tossed in heaps on the rug.
    The director notes they're having
    so much fun, perhaps they'd consider
    beginning the process all over again,
    each actor grinning gladly
    as the other struggles out
    from confining clothing
    a second time or even a third,
    until they collide into each other,
    warm skin to skin as in a dream.

    v 22

    The camera pulls back to reveal


    a secluded interior, soft lighting
    in the space between takes,
    amber whiskey in two crystal
    glasses resting on a bedside-table.
    And in the final cut, a close-up
    of two people laughing, his hands
    deftly unclasping a tangled strand
    of glowing blue beads at her throat.

    v 23

    CLARIFYING THE LANGUAGE


    As a traveler who turns aside
    in the night in unfamiliar terrain,
    assuming on faith an unlatched door
    and a jolt of warm whisky are within,
    just so he arrived at her front door,
    out of breath, in casual disarray.
    He called her by name,
    whispered in her untranslated brain
    the complex grammar of their history,
    its varied pronouns, the conditional,
    the way his foot cramps in the night.
    Here where scant light clatters,
    their paired voices create a fine dialect,
    a just-invented language,
    practicing adverbs quickly, voraciously.

    v 24

    CORRESPONDENCE
    Dear Landscape, she writes.
    My yard is larger than yours
    yet I seldom trudge the back forty.
    Your porch has pots growing things.
    Herbs and grasses. Not that I care.
    Rabbits are rampant everywhere.
    These letters crisscross like zinnias.
    Sometimes she addresses him,
    Dearest Lamb. Other times,
    Dear Escaped Convict. Green trees
    disguise him. Around any corner, he
    might as well be in another time zone.
    They plot their embraces across
    the International Date Line.
    Shoals and sand bars dominate
    fields between sidewalks.
    A garage light, left burning,
    throws patterns on concrete walls,
    indecipherable scrawls. They never
    know what new impediment
    will obstruct their garden plot.
    He travels in any manner of
    conveyance. Wheels or a litter.
    Oh letter! she writes, your alibis
    carry you over potholes and
    grasslands, circuitous routes to arrive
    breathless, in helmet, gear and riffraff.
    She seldom dresses for the occasion.
    Dear Open Boat, she writes.
    Dear Hover Craft.
    Dear battered Snow Mobile.
    Come when the weather moderates.
    Dear Landscape, my sweet thicket.
    v 25

    THE DENT

    What remains
    is the dent
    in the crisp
    pillowcase where
    recently he rested
    his Archaic head
    more marble
    than flesh lavish
    the head
    Greek-like in
    outline a kind of
    hero extolled
    by a lone passing
    minstrel
    Now is left
    only the dent
    from the head
    as he slept
    on his cheek
    as if some dusty
    curator placed in
    a museum case
    a shadowed
    piece polished and
    gleaming angular
    nose lips chin
    lids closed
    resting just this
    afternoon tousled
    curls quarried and
    carved formal
    bold immortal
    The head so
    recently lying
    next to her own
    v 26

    Preserve it
    a dent
    in the gleaming
    white pillow
    Encase it in stone.

    v 27

    DISCORDANT
    Your life and your
    life and it's not
    as though she
    doesn't have -and it's not
    as though cluttered
    and battered maybe
    flattened mangled
    maybe like the
    god damn
    weather -- absurd
    lake effects unheard of affection
    doubtless unstable this weather
    loose slats flapping
    high winds such
    definition of household inhabitants
    ambling the shimmering streets in
    frequent no-show
    no more snow in
    spite of
    because of
    your life and
    whose life
    and her

    v 28

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