Syllabus

    .. The coming rain

    for rain. The boy to laugh and make

    me chase him from the garden. The garden

    for the moon to find. This land for work

    which makes us whole, which holds for us

    the days and holds away the dark.

    

Since Hesiod at least, you were

about to say, poets have been

writing about our experience with

the land, and in this time, there

has been abundant opportunity for

the germination of cliché. It does

not seem that Nathaniel Perry has

conspicuously new things to report

on this relationship, but for one

who abides with a bit of it around

him, a consciousness of participat-

ing in our long extraction from it

leads to a gathering kind of awe.

And for this it is agreeable, for

there to be those who can puncture

it, with imagery of immediate reli-

ability. There are lines in the po-

em extracted here, which I'm reluc-

tant to spill, so sure am I of the

pleasure of making their discovery

in the old-fashioned way. But it

may do no harm, to cite a further

tool from his kit, which is basic

to the necessary accident of stum-
bling upon irreducible experience.

    A pen-knife for a splinter.

    

Nathaniel Perry

Nine Acres

  Tools

  [fragment]

op. cit.

Gerhard Richter

Unidentified canvas

  [fragment]