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Reaching
By George P. Elliott
1979. Edition of 326.
9.25 x 6"; 34 pages. Paper is Rives. Type is Spectrum. Designed by Herb Yellin. In quarter cloth over brown paper covered boards. Illustrated by Irving Block. Signed by poet and illustrator.
The book is part of the twentieth anniversary celebration of California State University and is in a series of Master Writers, edited by Norman Tanis. Thirteen of Elliott's poems.
$75
"The rightness of the placing of live words
Doubles their freshness and delights sour heart
But also holds them fast, mosaic-like:
There, only there, like bits of colored glass.
Blaze of arrangement! Our own words! Still ours!
But they're no longer moved by tongues that touch them,
Though speech flows on; the silt change leaves behind
Deposits on their surfaces a film
That softens inward their assembled light.
Out ward, inward: they seem to glow both ways,
Mellow with permanence, yet fierce with loss,
And the film sets. I see them flaring out
Against the labels they'll be pasted with,
Against the crust of glossary sure to come.
Dark-caverned, luminous Dante; clumsy Melville;
Ben Johnson, once a belching torch of a man;
Grey-eyed Jane Austen: names for crusted words;
And Beowulf is further than the moon.
There's too much time. They're dying everywhere.
Friend, listen: I am reaching: take my life."
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