| In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human
history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts
of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening
with Cain launched into exile—"from the good book hurled /
out to beget the world"—Rogoff then sweeps us along in his
imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the
means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore
sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy
and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence
from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously
enlist the
power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster
and helping us proceed.
In a great variety of forms both traditional and experimental,
Rogoff's poems meditate on "the long fault" into which we
will all tumble. Like Hamlet staring into the eyes of Death,
The Long Fault resists the encroaching dark with the
imaginative sympathy, strong lyricism, and strange humor that
powerful poetry can provide.
"Cain's Gift"
The blood cried up from the ground
and the air held its breath,
the earth's sunset-stained
face now an epitaph
for Abel's head and hands
thrust up from the grave,
that childish face profiled,
those hands clasped, a child
imagined by the sculptor
petitioning the God
who'd let the model murder
play out unimpeded.
From brother to his keeper
the singing from the sod
rose, a sunset lark
whose quavers left their mark
on Cain's consciousness,
setting him aquiver
at walking the cooling face
of earth, banished forever
from Salisbury's Chapter House,
a period put to his chapter,
and from the good book hurled
out to beget the world.
"Art lives and life becomes art, each reaching through
the other toward the divine, which is also and inevitably
flawed. The Long
Fault is dazzling, soaring, and inspiring poetry."
— Andrew Hudgins
"Like the guy he spies playing the trumpet while speeding
down the freeway, Jay Rogoff takes us zephyring through history,
playing his music while sitting behind the wheel." —
Lucia Perillo
Jay Rogoff is the author of the poetry collections
The Cutoff and How We Came to Stand on That Shore.
His verse has appeared in Agni, Georgia Review, Kenyon
Review, Literary Imagination, The Progressive, Southern Review,
and many other journals. A lecturer in English at Skidmore
College, he lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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