Winner of the 2020 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
West Portal is the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where poet Benjamin Gucciardi grew up. It is also one of the names of the Pillars of Heracles—the entryway to the afterworld. Drawing on William Carlos Williams’s assertion that “the local is the only thing that is universal,” West Portal investigates the Bay Area’s urban and rural landscapes along with the memories and people that reside there. Interweaving the narrative of the death of the poet's sister with the environmental and socioeconomic realities of the current moment, the poems in West Portal illuminate the experience of loss, and the attempt to create meaning in the wake of devastation. Through poems that are prayerful, observant, elegiac, pained, dreamlike, philosophical, and compassionate, the book asks: What do we consider holy? What is virtue? What should any of us value about our relationship to place or our relationship with each other?

lgrsnf/AN 3197541.pdf.pdf

Gucciardi, Benjamin

United States, United States of America

"West Portal is the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where poet Benjamin Gucciardi grew up. It is also one of the names of the Pillars of Heracles-the entryway to the afterworld. Drawing on William Carlos Williams's assertion that "the local is the only thing that is universal," West Portal investigates the Bay Area's urban and rural landscapes along with the memories and people that reside there. Interweaving the narrative of the death of the poet's sister with the environmental and socioeconomic realities of the current moment, the poems in West Portal illuminate the experience of loss, and the attempt to create meaning in the wake of devastation. Through poems that are prayerful, observant, elegiac, pained, dreamlike, philosophical, and compassionate, the book asks: What do we consider holy? What is virtue? What should any of us value about our relationship to place or our relationship with each other?"-- Provided by publisher

Contents
Foreword by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
1.
Type Two
Advice for Pallbearers
King Tide
Prayer for the Instant City
I Ask My Sister’s Ghost How Dying Is
Spill
The Hermitage at Laurel Dell
Halo for the Scorched Orchard
I Ask My Sister’s Ghost How Her Days Are Now
Masa
2.
Rendering the Pose
3.
Hunting Chanterelles in the Oakland Hills
The Rungs
Futile, — the winds —
The Invisible Hand Knocks Twice
Lines for John Berryman on the Bus from Little Mogadishu
Salve Regina
The Arachnologist
The Last Bear in the Headlands
Sonora Desert Halo
I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Take Me with Her
4.
I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Play a Game of Cribbage
Little Accents
The Kaleidoscope
Braille in Sicily
Outside Tallahassee
Halo for Evacuees
Self-Portrait with Daughter
Chosen Landscape
The Nest
I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Write Her Own Elegy
Acknowledgments

2024-03-16