The Arrangement of Space

The Arrangement of Space, winner of the 1990 Peregrine Smith Poetry  Competition, is comprised of three poetic sequences.

Rich with lyric music and luminous with thought, The Arrangement of Space further establishes Martha Collins’ important role in American poetry. In her poems, dream and world, image and idea, sound and sense merge. This is the work of a poet blessed with a fierce intelligence and marked by a troubling imagination.

 

Martha Collins’ poems are excellent, musical, a little quirky, and endlessly fascinating. The Arrangement of Space will prove a durable and fascinating companion.” —Bill Matthews

Comprised of a narrative fragment called ‘Women in American Literature,’ 30 lyrics entitled ‘A Book of Days,’ and a series of six thematically linked ‘suites,’ Collins’s newest collection offers the reader an impressionistic overview of a poetic mind.”     —Publishers Weekly

This is a fine, disturbing, mature body of work, well worth reading and reading again.”     —Laurel Blossom,Small Press

In The Arrangement of Space, we move through a mystical and highly politicized landscape fraught with danger but also providing abrupt awakenings to hope. Martha Collins’s voice is a blade boring down to essence. It is brilliant, spare, and powerful.”      — Sojourner

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from A Book of Days

 

8

                      Christmas Afternoon

They've drained the old pond, they're digging it deeper.
Two derricks face each other across the mud,
stumps, rubble, brush,
an oval of water, wrinkled like skin,
that yesterday was rain.

All right. I cried last night when the choir sang
and almost cried when the brass band played
in the almost April weather of late December.

This morning not the want, but the wanting not.

Across the street, wind chimes chime.

On the other bank three small trees
are growing together: an I, a Y, an intricate shape,
a woman leaning into the wind,
arms raised, breasts, straining against
the limbs of the others, who hold her there.

Everyone alive in the world is very nearly the same age.

I am still the baby in that house.

 

22

In the rain, the bark of the plane trees shines
in the colors, the shapes of camouflage:
trees looking like men looking like trees.

When the sun shines, the trees shade
the grass a darker green, the thick veins
of giant leaves, a giant's hands—

Terrain with deep cracks, that old puzzle---

In California, it rained on the queen
and the president, it rained on the good
and the bad, it rained on me.

In the jungle, it rained, it has rained,
it rains on bodies fallen
like leaves, on bodies that walk—

In the rain, the shadows disappear.

In a larger rain, things are lost.

In the largest rains, borders emerge—

A puzzle coming apart, becoming the world.