Saturday, 04 September 2010

A daisy in the memory of a shark - Pete Winslow


A daisy in the memory of a shark is a collection of poems by little known US surrealist poet Pete Winslow, published by City Lights Books in 1973. Winslow was just 37 when he died the year before as a result of complications following surgery. He had published a handful of small collections since the early 1960s. There is very little information about Winslow on the internet.

Lines from some of the poems in A daisy in the memory of a shark read as follows:


I called the ocean by its first name
I became an eon but a billion years passed in an instant...


A strange wind carries children to the tops of buildings...


How may I become your clothes when you are so lovely nude
This is the problem of the moon
Whose solution is to disappear...


The invisible telephones of the wind are ringing...


I am famous for the beer which flows from my hair...


Morning stretched its layers of light so softly
That hundreds of night creatures caught unaware
Run about on the table while we have coffee...


I bid my life for the girl tasting of poppies...


The murmur of the city is the beginning of the earthquake...


Your eyelids close
And you inspect me with your alternate eyes...


My pillow over my face
Its hair turning my mind to feathers...


My portrait is ill today its hair is falling out...

1 comment:

MikeB said...

It is great to see some group outside of the USA take notice of one of the lost treasures of American modern poetry. Pete Winslow was a fantastic poet whose record, inexplicably, has almost disappeared. His poetry was wildly beautiful. I hope he might yet tunnel back from near-oblivion into the bright spaces his poetry so clearly deserves.
Mike Bevis, USA