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 childimagined 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 markon 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.
Jay Rogoff has published seven books of poetry, including Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems. His literary criticism has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, the Southern Review, and many other journals. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
"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
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