Winner of the 2005 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize
Sigman Byrd: Under The Wanderer's Star

 

“It's the child astronomer Sigman Byrd thinks about, the one who still has the dream, even if the universe is growing fainter. And it is Ms. Fewkes, the town librarian, who tells us tenderly to buckle up as we head off for the dangerous, but exquisite, woods. These are poems of the lost paradise and the great imaginary place, beautifully rendered.”—Gerald Stern, judge of the 2005 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

“In times of madness, in times of mendacity, measure becomes more than a matter of craft. It becomes a virtue, a wisdom, and, I do not hesitate to add, a state of grace. In the sure and reassuring measure of Under The Wanderer's Star, Sigman Byrd shows a protean calm and a cosmographer’s composure. This is a noble collection.” —Donald Revell

“The anatomy of disappointed longing takes surprisingly delightful shapes in the antic, rich and rueful poems of Sigman Byrd. As desire’s shining place, forever just around the bend, fades to the credits, epic history shrinks to a diorama, and the old constellations are 'breaking up, accelerating out of the frame,' Byrd relocates the magic in the words that have always created it—and what a word magician he is!” —Eleanor Wilner

Sigman Byrd’s Under the Wanderer’s Star takes flight, fueled by longing and desire. “Jack Tar’s Song” opens the book: “I have shredded the harbor maps/ so I may speak, so I, too, can/ make a great discovery beyond/ the sea, beyond the constant/ cries of the sea.’ The ropes are rolled./ the quarter decks newly caulked./ Set sail, I am ready, ship of / alchemists and conjurers.” “The Child Astronomer” refuses to hear of his becoming “a dazzling dream of long ago.” However, the Astronauts who “brought back the moon’s formage and held it up for the maw/ of crowds and whirring cameras” are grounded, as is Byrd’s satire, in reality. Through the poet’s images, measured diction and visions, readers travel “in search of the place that has never been seen or verified, changing form constantly in the search.”—Kaye Bache-Snyder, Small Press Review

ISBN-13: 9780975919798; ISBN-10: 0975919792 $12.95

 

The Child Astronomer

Don’t tell him Galileo went blind
staring at sunspots or swashbuckling
Tycho Brahe had his nose
sliced off dueling over equations.
No, he’ll discover on his own one day
how even the noblest quests burn up
to nothing in so much random solar wind.
Meanwhile, let him crack open
a geometry book, the playground is empty.
Let him squint through a telescope
at all the tinseled planets and stars,
Orion the hunter, Auriga the charioteer,
wheeling their incandescent teams.
Don’t tell him they’re all growing fainter,
gods and heroes and winged horses
breaking up, accelerating out of the frame.
Don’t tell him he too will become
a world of refracted light and myth,
a dazzling dream of long ago, spinning,
remote, barely visible to the naked eye.

 

Budget Carnival

Instead of the bearded lady,
a teenaged boy in a ball gown
and a little velvet scruff lining his chin.
Rather than Siamese twins,
two grumpy stepsisters behind
a curtain reciting The Origin of Species.

In the funhouse just a cracked
hand mirror taped to a dusty wall,
while outside, a station wagon purring
where once a Ferris wheel swept us
screaming through a painted phantasm
of wind and sky and clouds.

Don’t forget to buckle up, said Ms. Fewkes,
our town librarian opening
the station wagon door and beckoning.
In the backseat a smiling poodle
she called Cerberus. So we hopped in,
thrilled by the wild rumor—

oh, let it be true, Ms. Fewkes!—
we were headed somewhere dangerous
and dimly lit, that we too
had come this far only to find
ourselves in these thorn-infested, fallen
but nevertheless exquisite woods.