new from above/ground press: Excerpts from Impossible Books, The Crawdad Cantos, by Stephen Brockwell

Excerpts from Impossible Books
The Crawdad Cantos
by Stephen Brockwell
$4

from The Evangelical Handbook for Engineers

A Primer for Drainage

What is the first article and axiom of our discipline?
That God made the Earth, the sun and moon, the stars
and everything that lives in and on his chosen sphere.
Therefore, no calculus of planetary orbits disproves
his dominion, no quantum mechanical uncertainty
casts doubt on his eternity, unlike the life of a cat in a box.
The testimony of experts does not negate his Testament.
He is the universal pendulum, the platinum-iridium bar,
the krypton-86 emission in a vacuum, the beam of light from which
a tiny moment measures out our microcosmic span.
Among time and distances, he is the absolute constant,
the being that lets being be – and every culvert,
aqueduct, conduit, sluice, grate, trench and duct
merely drains the ephemeral projection of his eternal tears.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

produced for a reading with rob mclennan in Louisiana as part of the Deep South Festival of Writers at UL-Lafayette on February 24, 2012.

Stephen Brockwell is the author of 4 books of poems. Fruitfly Geographic won the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award for the best book of poetry by an Ottawa writer. His Excerpts from Impossible Books is an interminable work in progress. Brockwell runs the small business www.brockwellit.com from his basement, borrowed office space and coffee shops.

This is Stephen Brockwell’s third above/ground press chapbook. Limited copies of his Marin County Poems (2001) and Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment) (2010) are still available, at $3 and $4, respectively.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com