Ash and Embers

Poems

James A. Zoller

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781532636103
  9781532636127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532636110
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of life's journey, sorting detritus from treasures, identifying and naming memory, finding categories that reflect life's winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various roles--son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, neighbor, teacher, citizen, believer, writer, and reader--as narrative stances, Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex, Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus, it embraces the tension that language is inadequate, alien, and, paradoxically, a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zoller's poems how we speak about life--as physical passage, as spiritual pilgrimage, as imagined patterns, as emotional canvas, as interwoven narrative strands, and as social construct--all these voices meet in one conversation. Between "Photographs" that begins the book and "Hard Copy" that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to "Second Knowings," from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time, eternity, and love.

Intrusions

Collateral Damage

When all the men of war are shot

And flags have fallen into dust,

Your cross and mine shall tell me still

Christ died on each, for both of us.

Thomas Merton, “For My Brother, Missing in Action 1943”

Some questions you would ask of God prove you unfit for God’s company.

William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers

News from the Front

This morning when bombs explode in Baghdad

and Iraqis kill more civilians than enemy

to send their confusingly blunt messages,

the language that accounts for the bodies

and waves the bleeding off in wailing ambulances,

the language that shapes what we see

is the language of our good intentions.

So this is what our good efforts have come to:

the obvious has been rendered obvious.

How wrenching

on any imaginable scale – the ruined cities,

the burned and mangled lorries,

black smoke billowing above the palms near the river,

bodies that may be civilians may be combatants

pulled from wreckage by ordinary brown hands

float in plain coffins above an angry crowd.

We have been at this battlefield before,

in a different foreign language. How did we forget?

We have known this moment before:

Whatever direction we look, we know

a people at war with itself.

Progress

Maps show elevations,

ground features, water sources.

Satellite cameras render details:

hard against soft, heat for light.

Computers enhance bits and bites

to bring them closer. All detail

is of great consequence.

The brown eyes, the two-day stubble,

the serial number on your weapon.

Soon we will grow software

to anticipate body language,

to tell us ...

Table of contents

• Ash & Embers
• In Medias Res
• Photographs
• Life and Metaphor
• Intrusions
• Prayers & Conversations
• Notes on Writing, Notes on Reading, A Few Odd and Well-Ordered Things
• Second Knowings
• Hard Copy
• Acknowledgements