“ Night Lights is a volume of exquisitely painterly skyscapes, waterscapes, city and mountainscapes”—Alicia Ostriker
Jane Augustine: Night Lights

Alicia Ostriker: “Night Lights is a volume of exquisitely painterly skyscapes, waterscapes, city and mountainscapes…set onto the page in language rich and precise. At the same time: the mind, meditative, scrupulous, thinking….As Augustine’s poems approach a world at war, she asks, 'Is awareness madness?' I think not, but I find myself rather madly in love with this poet’s eye, her music, her awareness.”

“Elegiac, lyrical, and passionately connected to the flow and ebb of the phenomenal world, Night Lights uplifts our poetry gaze.. `Now just this: the earth not in the sun’s way/ A perfect ivory mirror reflects the eye/opening/…' Jane Augustine’s investigative eye is to be trusted and applauded.”— Anne Waldman

ISBN: 0972478590 $15.00

 

On Transitory and Arbor Vitae:

American Book Review : “Transitory is primarily a meditation on mortality, permanence, war and the nature of the human body…. no hyperbole, no glorification of pain, only visual perceptions coolly stated….In Arbor Vitae the poet records the sights and sounds closest to her… meditations on natural forces, on our aspirations toward creating some kind of human permanence….Taken together, Transitory and Arbor Vitae seem field notes on a single life’s passage through a world in which every object has both dark and light sides, with something to be learned from each.”

“Like the classical Chinese poets, her teachers, Jane Augustine seizes the natural world with her eyes. This is a poetry of memorable clarity and economy, from which the reader retains, first, visual impressions, in which the beauty of things and beings is perceived equally.... Then... the implications of human life, death and change take shape in an acuity of observation which one might also call wisdom.” –Marilyn Hacker

Jane Augustine has published Arbor Vitae and Transitory: A Poem Sequence, as well as three poetry chapbooks. A New York State Council on the Arts fellowship winner, she edited The Gift by H.D.: The Complete Text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, and Memory: Quai d’Orsay
walking in Paris after a concert

Romance of the guitar. No escape
even in sharpest winter cold on
the Quai d’Orsay.
A surrender to now beyond body,
material, hour as it goes on
within—and on out
not stopping but stopped as
over the Seine in the blue-
metal dusk shone

the great gold sonorous moon.
*
Steel-gray clouds to the west still hold
a little light while the moon
full in the east
repeats itself in small gold moons
on the drive beside the river.
Bitterer wind
on the old, old stone bridge harries
the footsteps of the long dead,
the soon dying,
the composer gone to music,
the player gone with it into
the ripple of lights
on the mutable bleu marine Seine.

Mending an Umbrella
for the anniversary of my mother’s death

A strut has broken.
It cut a hole in the black cloth.
Impossible to mend, but
the two bent ends can be wrapped together
with duct tape, so it flexes—
but this is a waste of time. The old thing
should be tossed.
Instead, it’s a multi-winged bat, caught
under my arm, tucked tight
so it won’t flop as I try to reach in
and secure the little bar
with a black thread-loop so it won’t wobble.
My painter friend painted
her mother as a white scrunched-up
bundle carried awkwardly.
She hated to lay that bundle down
and feel relieved.
It wasn’t relief, exactly, to have to give
her up. The end wasn’t just
failure of a mechanism—although what else?
Because the one place
got mended doesn’t mean it offers much,
this black umbrella. Rain
usually brings high winds, and you see them
everywhere, busted
upside down in curbside trash baskets.
This one stands neatly
by the hall door, an inverted exclamation-point.