Michigan State University Press | Reading the Earth

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Claude Wilkinson

Claude Wilkinson is a Memphis, Tennessee native whose work has appeared in African American Review, Arkansas Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Georgetown Review, and numerous other publications. H...

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Reading the Earth

Claude Wilkinson

Wilkinson is the winner of the 2000 Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation $35,000 award, given annually to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise

That Claude Wilkinson is bonded to the southern landscape and deeply in love with it is evident in the forty-four poems that make up Reading the Earth. These poems demonstrate a rare sensitivity to the natural world and its significance to human lives. Observers of the most mundane aspect of nature, the author not only reports but immerses the reader into full participation in his Eden.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, the author grew up on a farm in northwest Mississippi and makes his home in Nesbit. He has taught in the English departments of a number of colleges and universities. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including Atlanta Review, Colorado North Review, Georgetown Review, Visions International, and Wind. Also a visual artist, his drawings and paintings have been exhibited in many museums throughout the South. Reading the Earth, his first published volume, is the winner of the fifth annual Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.

Slug

How is it that even through the pitch-black lawn
and drizzle as awesome
as a typhoon for you, the gauntlet of night beaks
for which you would
be simply greasy ambrosia, that you, without so
much as one decent
eye, wand no other visible guide but the map of
your diaphanous lust,
can manage to lube a way onto my porch to take
what the dog has left?
Anyhow, perhaps it was that slow bulging of horns
as you dribbled into
the orgy of scraps— those horns, and your rising
from damp waves
of grass that likened you to evil, the beast of
Revelation that will
come from the sea. Perhaps, it was because you
were my only
real chance to prove the philosophy of resisting
sin, be the salt
I’m supposed to be, that I squandered a few grains,
and marveled
at how you dwindled like lightning from both ends
at once.

World rights

85 pp., 6.00" x 9.00", 1997
Paper, $14.95,

0-87013-481-7
978-0-87013-481-4

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