StartleResponse.com shouts out to Buck Downs‘ Unintended Empire, a project showcasing both a writer and bookmaker (Furniture Press) at the top of their craft. As I noted in the preface to the book, the selection of poems typifies the muscular lyrical emotiveness of the writer’s work:
The powder keg of aching loss meets a persistently altered physical or psychic state, a habitation to which Buck returns, well, habitually in his work. For those of us who do not demur from embracing poetry as a locus of meaning, the effect is intimate, heartbreaking, epiphanic. The punctuation and enjambment are deliberately precise. We pause; we take stock. We read on, with a sureness inspired by the lyric’s conviction.
StartleResponse.com pairs this force of nature with a pair of Dan Post boots, also an example of American craft and endurance.
If these boots don’t accompany me to my green burial place, perhaps my niece will wear them well into her dotage. In other words, they ain’t going to the knacker yard anytime soon … like a great poem.
From Buck Downs‘ HEY NOW / ALL RIGHT / BUCK DOWNS (2015):
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