Parasol: Poems 1977--2007

By Hal Steven Shows

In language at once bracingly direct and lyrical, these poems, which roam from the freest of free verse to traditional forms, fuse the creative heart and the keen critical intellect in a way reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence and Stanley Kunitz. Their themes range from the personal to the global. Classical motifs merge with modern mayhem, and the results are revelatory. At the centre of the book is the search for love in a world that degrades the notion daily. This rare book of poems will appeal equally to the scholar, the critic, the lover of poetry, and all students of the human heart. Florida poet and musician Hal Shows is a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellow and a member of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences. His latest recording, Native Dancer, issued in 2003. Parasol is his first full-length collection of poems. Published by Black Bay Books, 2015. Original paper edition, Luniver Press, UK, 2007.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hal Steven Shows
• Release date: Jul 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311706171

Hal Steven Shows

Florida poet and musician Hal Shows is a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. A chapbook of his poems, A Breath for Nothing, appeared from the Anhinga Press in 1977. With the band Persian Gulf he released Changing the Weather (1984), Persian Gulf: the Movie (1986), and Trailer (1987). Subsequent solo productions include Birthday Suit (1990), Lifeboat (1995), Whitman’s Sampler (2000), Native Dancer (2003), and Treasure of Love, (2012). Parasol, his first full-length volume of poems, was published in 2007. A book of essays and incidental prose, The Bandshell Project, was published late in 2014, and a new recording project is in the works. He teaches English and Literature at Keiser University, in Tallahassee, Florida.

Book preview

As he makes arrangements and manhandles the bags,

Father is strangely boyish, and happier now,

as though he were springing his son from jail

in broad daylight; Mother is duty-bound by right

to engage in a moistly protracted round of adieus;

and baby sister's long lament for her first love

begins. In a rocking chair in a dark recess,

Grandma purses her papery lips, pondering

her own always more imminent date of departure,

her clasped hands the bluish color of woodsmoke.

It's morning. The sun floods the open window where

year by year the boy has imagined the woman, the world.

All but forgotten in a cluttered corner, a pair

of rough workman's shoes dozes, remembering the roads.

Fatherland

Soon after sleep I find myself

lost somewhere but close to a home

I'd almost forgotten,

in a big playground ringed by pines.

I know if I stare

at the same spot in faraway shade

my father will come. I do; he does.

Wildly he waves. Wedding bands

flung from his fingers

make sail-like arcs of gold in the sun.

With a hollow footfall

I feel in my backbone he starts across.

He is close to me now.

Looming large, a long lost pal,

with a quick twist of his sad

familiar body, feigning effort,

he swings a heavy canvas sack

off of his shoulder across to me

and it falls at my feet, spilling wide.

It is full of fantastic blueprints.

With an almost imperceptible bow

he steps back, begins fading.

My fingers fumble in the bluish air

where his chest has been.

Alone with my lost birthright, I kneel.

At my back, cool and eternal,

the whispering pines spread rumors.

Jacob's Ladder

In broad sunlight and sulfurous gloom

Orpheus did his effortless utmost lute-wise,

got the grace notes, copped cadenzas.

And every animal praised his tune.

What it was worth is terrible to tell:

Loss, and a round-trip ticket to Hell.

And so in the end he came

home again to the halved house

alone, bearing only his name.

A Witching Town

Come closing time, certain clamorous gentlemen

tilt at maternal windmills as the bottomless

beveled looking glass gives up its regular ghosts.

On rubbery legs the sex pals rise to go

in a reek of Frangelica, dully intense, aping abandon.

Two by two they pass the bar.