I like the way the rooster lifts his feet,
So jauntily exact,
Then droops one springy yellow claw aloft
Just like a tailor gathering up a pleat.
And then there are those small surprising lilts,
Both rollicking and staid,
That grace his bishop’s gait,
Like a waltzer on a pair of supple stilts
Or a Russian on parade.

                                                    from ‘Rooster’

The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby’s precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across ‘all the empty places’ of the world.

Cover image Engraving on paper of real and fantastic animals (detail), Florence c. 1460-70. Copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum

Contents

Origins

I
After Becquer
Our Spiders
Microcosm
Conch Shell
Starfish
Ant-Lion
Spider
Flamingos
Grackle
Anhinga
Rooster
Watchdog and Rooster
Craneworld
Cradle-Song of the Emperor Penguins
The Egyptian Vulture
Garter Snake
The Baboons of Hada
Lichens
Milkweed
Skunk Cabbage
Mullein
Live Oak, with Bromeliads

II
The Crossing
Getting Ready for the Night
The Suitors of my Grandmother’s Youth
Two Views of My Grandfather’s Courting Letters
Adages of a Grandmother
Hand-Painted China
Finding a Portrait of the Rugby Colonists, My Ancestors
Among Them
A Freshly Whitewashed Room
My Mother in Old Age
Childhood House
Dicie Fletcher
The Jewel Box

III
For a Modest God
What the Snow Was Not
Salle des Martyrs
Mutanabbi in Exile
The Caliph
Lazarus in Skins
Forgetful Lazarus
Lazarus and Basements
Lazarus Listens
Mrs Lazarus
Hate
Gravediggers’ April
Nose
Fingernails
Fetish
Blood
Another Thing
Conquests of Childhood
Childhood Pieties
The Song of the Whisk
Episode with a Potato

IV
Bavarian Shrine
Railyard in Winter
Florida Bay
Daybreak at the Straits
A Salt Marsh near Truro
Nova Scotia
Gazing at Waves
An Epistle from Rice Point
Coastlines
An Oak Skinned by Lightning
The Public Gardens

History

Acknowledgements