The Corpse Flower brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title: an enormous tropical bloom that reeks like carrion, and around whose three-day florescence "dung beetles & flies & sweat bees swarm / . . . pollen gummed all over / their furred feet." The corpse flower serves as a figure for Beasley's coming to terms with birth and death, fecundity and decay, the illusion of death, and the flourishing of the rare and beautiful out of the materials of the decayed.

The Corpse Flower traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. Beasley's is a deeply physical spirituality - as he writes in one poem, "the soul's / impossible to tell / from the objects of its appetite." Throughout these poems, family mythology, as well as religious and mythic narrative and iconography, become occasions for extraordinary meditations on the physicality of birth and death, beginnings and endings. This substantial selection of Bruce Beasley's work, written over a twenty year period, offers the opportunity to experience, page by page, a poet's evolution, and to follow a unique, creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution - a resolution increasingly represented by the beauties of language itself.

On Summer Mystagogia

"These brilliant poems, often both mythic and demotic, powerfully initiate the reader into a world at once marred and yet suffused by the signs and wonders of an 'irresistible grace.' . . . A wonderfully resilient and hard-won poetry of witness." -Boston Review

Bruce Beasley is professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is the author of five previous books including Spirituals and Signs and Abominations. Among his awards and honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, two Pushcart Prizes, the 1996 Colorado Prize (chosen by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia, the Ohio State University Press / Journal Award for The Creation, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia Press for Lord Brain.On Summer Mystagogia

INITIALS

from Spirituals (1988), The Creation (1994), and Summer Mystagogia

Witness

The Creation of Eve

Eve, Learning to Speak

Childhood

Indian Summer

Summer

The Instrument and Proper Corps of the Soule

At Easter

The Reliquary

Novice

The Cursing of the Fig Tree

Eurydice in Hades

Sweet Repeaters

Summer Mystagogia

Primavera

Ugly Ohio

Idaho Compline

Arcana Mundi

Advent: Snow Incantation

Doxology

The Monologue of the Signified

from A Mythic History of Alcoholism

After an Adoration

Sleeping in Santo Spirito

A Dogwood Tree in a Country Graveyard, at Easter

Ultrasound

Before Thanksgiving

Going Home to Georgia

The Conceiving

EXTREMITIES

from Signs and Abominations

What Did You Come to See

Negatives of O'Connor and Serrano

Hermetic Diary

Hermetic Self-Portrait

Mutating Villanelle

Errata Mystagogia

from Spiritual Alphabet in Midsummer

from The Mosntrum Fugue

MORTOGENESES

The Corpse Flower: New Poems (2006)

The Corpse Flower


Is

Not Light nor Life nor Love nor Nature nor Spirit nor Seblance

nor Anthing We Can Put into Words

And Go into the Street Which Is Called Straight

The Craps Hymnal

Lord's Prayer

Rotbox

Mortogenesis

The Vanishing Point

Acknowledgments

About the Poet