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RAIN IN A SUNLIT SKY

Prose Poems by James Hoggard

Published by Page One Publications/Stone River Press
ISBN 0-9627844-5-1

5-1/2 x 8-1/2 Paperback with Perfect Binding
60 Pages with 33 prose poems

“This poet ... aches in every nerve to leap beyond himself.” “Hoggard tweaks the formula of Baudelaire’s prose poem to achieve many of the same effects for the contemporary reader.” In Part 1 “...his daily world is the Southwest, with its summer-long heat waves, withering droughts, torrents and blue northers, a landscape of repressed desires where the weather erupts like powerful floods of libido.” In Part II, poems about his travels, “...life becomes symbolic and animated by mythical passions: things merge and transform out of dream logic, and take meaning within a religion of nature.
   From the Introduction by Paul Christensen

LINES from the Poem “At First a Bewildering Chill (Pacquime ruins, Northern Mexico)”

It’s outsiders now who stir this place, who, keeping it clean, keep the scorpions and snakes away, except at night when no feet shake this earth and no rites encourage the moon to ask the stars to shift into patterns that heal, and no ghosts open vague arms to release old dreams, and no drums beat to summon new wild ones in.

The cold desert’s winter wind was harassing me, telling me now to quit this place: the dances and songs that had conjured the site weren’t mine.

JAMES HOGGARD is the McMurtry Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, and was named the Texas State Poet Laureate for 2000. A former NEA Fellow and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has authored numerous literary works throughout his career, including essays, short stories, plays and hundreds of poems. Rain in a Sunlit Sky is his sixth book of poetry, with fourteen books in all.

SENSUAL, MYTHICAL, SYMBOLIC PROSE POETRY FOR THE DISCERNING READER.