The Devil’s Fools Book Release
Poetry by Mary Gilliland
Subverting received traditions, embellishing mythic figures, the lyrics of The Devil’s Fools speak to and for those wanting heaven: modern pilgrims, medieval masons; seafarer, axe murderer, alcoholic; daughter, spouse, sibling, mother; a woman on pause, a monarch of the underworld, Eve stepping out past Eden. One country bombs another, there’s mass animal slaughter during epidemic, never-ending yard work, love letters from the dead. Humans sorrow and glory, mourn and thrive, treasure the will to live—with burdock and mushroom, apple and willow, cicada, cuckoo, brontosaurus, toad. The poems represent wild and delicious creaturely delusion, deception, vigor and joy.
Book Title:
The Devil’s Fools
Publisher:
Codhill Press
Price: $16.00
Page Count: 82
Formats: Paperback Available:November 1, 2022 ISBN: 978-1-949933-16-1
Vendors: Codhill Press, SUNY Press
From The Devil’s Fools
PROSERPINE
I fell in with a man from a small country.
He stopped on a rainy lane and asked did I want a ride.
My mother’d told me always to follow my feet
but the fumes that day overpowered my nose.
He bit me hard then nubbed at my love pearl.
Red seeds fell from the wound. He says I ate them.
He offered me board if I paid for room
among bloodless artistes and ivory heroes
by charging his battery—one or two shocks.
Time passed and faded. There’s a beauty in that.
He took up his helmet. I saw he was sightless.
I said let’s let it rip. Soot fell about us.
Once I’d signed his note that hell could not be
improved on, he set me loose for the summer.
He’d have slipped me into his wallet if I’d fit.
THE BARGAIN
I forgive the young doe for eating the blackeyed susans,
for hosta tops bitten just as the flowerheads formed.
So intelligent—she waited for the sweetest mouthfuls.
She’s the first deer to stand, to let me sing to her.
A few brief chews, then she lifts her head like a bird,
walks off calmly into the woods after swallowing fallen pears.
This is a good house. We let out a milksnake curled in the basement
and moved in. Five years ago a stag browsed six-foot burdock.
Above their spikes antlers rose before he bolted.
The animals go before us, prints marking woods edge and trail and the fair trade of the forest: lettuce and green beans.
Fence wire bends where cleft hooves sank, darkening moist loam.
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Are we all in some ways The Devil’s Fools? The title of Mary Gilliland’s new poetry collection is slyly ironic, suggesting our misperceptions of life’s blessings and tragedies is apt to make us seem so. These poems shed light and bring joy where we might otherwise despair or slog through life unaware.
The Devil’s Fools begins at breakneck speed. Various narrators guide the reader to commune with the human, the winged, the crawling, the faded, the medieval, the tempting, the epidemic, and with gods spanning classical to present times. How to make a new life in the same body, from the same symbols? The Devil’s Fools offers an account of how one person cultivated a garden amid a tempest. Gilliland’s book closes with a bucolic prayer- like stillness, yet however much beauty these poems unearth, there are no false claims of order; the moral landscape is harrowing, fraught with enchantment, disenchantment, reënchantment.
Mary Gilliland is author of the award-winning poetry collections The Devil’s Fools and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Council for the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, where she was instrumental in developing the Knight Institute for Writing and taught such courses as “Ecosystems & Ego Systems” for the Biology & Society Program and “Mind & Memory: Creativity in the Arts & Sciences” for the Society for the Humanities. She has also taught and performed at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival, the Chautauqua Institute, and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, the Dalai Lama’s seat in North America.