Talk across Water by Merrill Gilfillan

Merrill Gilfillan, Talk across Water: Stories Selected and New

ISBN 978-0-9981695-7-6 $17.95

Now available from Flood Editions and SPD Books/Small Press Distribution

Red Mavis by Merrill Gilfillan

Red Mavis by Merrill Gilfillan

Now Available from Flood Editions

ISBN 978-0-9838893-7-3 $14.95

The red mavis, better known as the brown thrasher, sings a tireless improvised song, “varied . . . usually pleasing,” lambent with “the gladness of the open air.” In this volume, Merrill Gilfillan draws on casual rhymes and lost commonplaces, composing his poems en plein air. He ranges from the Carolina woods to the California coastline, and from “salted haikus” to prose meditations. Everywhere, his writing is marked by deftness, exuberance, and appetite: “Always hungry—Toujours / la faim as it reads on / the family crest.”

“Alfresco” by Merrill Gilfillan

Read “Alfresco,” a wonderful essay by Merrill Gilfillan, in the December issue of Poetry magazine. His new book, Red Mavis, is forthcoming from Flood Editions in January.

Red Mavis by Merrill Gilfillan

Red Mavis by Merrill Gilfillan

Forthcoming from Flood Editions in January 2014

ISBN 978-0-9838893-7-3 $14.95

The red mavis, better known as the brown thrasher, sings a tireless improvised song, “varied . . . usually pleasing,” lambent with “the gladness of the open air.” In this volume, Merrill Gilfillan draws on casual rhymes and lost commonplaces, composing his poems en plein air. He ranges from the Carolina woods to the California coastline, and from “salted haikus” to prose meditations. Everywhere, his writing is marked by deftness, exuberance, and appetite: “Always hungry—Toujours / la faim as it reads on / the family crest.”

 

 

Gilfillan in Chicago Review

The new issue of Chicago Review (56:2/3) includes a thoughtful review by Dustin Simpson of Merrill Gilfillan’s The Bark of the Dog (poems) and The Warbler Road (essays). The review can be read online here. The issue also contains an essay by Charles Alteri on Jennifer Moxley’s Clampdown (along with Juliana Spahr), and poems by William Fuller and Tom Pickard. Come to think of it, we recommend subscribing.

Gilfillan in The Nation

Merrill Gilfillan’s new books, The Bark of the Dog (poems) and The Warbler Road (essays) receive praise in The Nation (February 14): “For Gilfillan, birding and writing poems are acts of casual grace, a sorting and weighing of the earth’s erosions and migrations, of the songs nesting on the air and in the ear.”

New Books by Merrill Gilfillan

Now available, two new books by Merrill Gilfillan, one of essays and the other of poetry:

The Warbler Road. Flood Editions ISBN 978-0-9819520-4-8 $15.95. In these twenty-six short essays, Merrill Gilfillan records his encounters with wood warblers as they flit through North American landscapes on their migratory paths. With precision, appetite, and a touch of whimsy, he sketches the tiny birds in their surroundings, perfecting the art of what he elsewhere calls “alfresco writing.” Throughout, The Warbler Road testifies to birding as a meditative, even votive dedication and a fundamental mode of attention to the world: “When I walk out with binoculars in May and September, it is often the fly fisherman in Yeats’s poem I have in mind as I move along the path. We are both out to discover and authenticate the morning, to break the glaze of habitude and mark, for an hour or so, the weave and fine points of the season and its day-in-place.” Peter Matthiessen describes The Warbler Road as “A bird book for poets, precisely and evocatively observed, beautifully written. Would that such a eulogy existed for every family of birds.”

The Bark of the Dog. Flood Editions ISBN 978-0-9819520-5-5 $14.95. In The Bark of the Dog, Merrill Gilfillan summons lyric equivalents to landscapes and day shapes, drawing on off-hand song, bird’s-eye bearings, and the vortical power of place names. Like Basho’s haiku, Gilfillan’s poems are anchored in time as well as space: an hour of the day, inflected by thunder or a pear; a month of the year, marked by the trees-in-wind or birds “moving through the mesh of the dangerous starlight.” Whether in casual epistles or country blues, we find ourselves immersed in the phenomenal world, propelled by the twin forces of curiosity and affinity: “When you get to Owl River / picture these poems / flying over the hills.”

Flood Editions, Year by Year

Here are all 55 titles from Flood Editions year by year, from the past fifteen years . . . with many more to come!

Red Mavis on The Rumpus

Patrick James Dunagan has published an appreciative review of Merrill Gilfillan’s Red Mavis at The Rumpus: “Shades of light; shadow of cloud; twitter of this or that fellow creature whether bird, human, or other. It is all a company with which he delights in sharing. The celebration abounds and is quite mutual. Masterly care of not only poetic craft yet tender attention to the event happening in the instant has never been more deceivingly displayed with such apparent ease.” To read the full review, go here.

Review of Fuller’s Hallucination

The new issue of Chicago Review includes a thoughtful review by John Beer of William Fuller’s Hallucination. The review concludes, “‘Glancing back / without remembering’ runs the final couplet of ‘The Elixir,’ and this might serve in its own way as a credo of Fuller’s poetics, with its prismatic evocations of the literary past and its seeming resolute refusal to generate totalities. . . . In ‘The Circuit,’ the prose poem mashing Zeno with Kafka that closes the volume, a hapless office worker bears a report that slowly grows to the size of a planet, even as it remains stubbornly unreadable. If the observing narrator has turned away from that unedifying spectacle to bear his own report, it’s one that, for all its extraterrestrial gravity, remains compelling and compulsively readable—and human-sized.” Read the full review here, and purchase the issue to read poems by Merrill Gilfillan and an interview with him, as well as translations by John Tipton and Andrew Joron.