Vegetable Love

Alan Britt

THE MOCKINGBIRD

It’s 2:04 in the morning
& this mockingbird
has already
been at it 45 minutes.

Variety unrivaled.

Chirps,
fractured
into strains
of Schoenberg,
Bartok,
Matisse!

Trills & combinations,
repetitions that rival
autumn’s
rusty hair,
swoops & dives
descending notes
in perfect unison!

The mockingbird’s
magnesium
slowly
condenses
on my spine.

I lie
in cold, black grass,
opening
the pages
of my bones.

The moon,
stalking the yard
in her mother-of-pearl nightgown,
presses her bruised lips
against my throat.

Wolves prowl
the black pearl corridors
of the moon’s waist.

A flexibility of razors
flies
from the mockingbird’s white shoulders.

Inert,
as a nerve
splintered in dusk,
I’m incredibly
well-preserved.

Today,
I could die happy
as though
in a hammock
of ashes.

ISBN 1-59661-108-1 58 pages/$9

Alan Britt cut his teeth on the poetry of the French Symbolists, yet his poems have no whiff of the dark back room of the café where much of that poetry is said to have been written. Britt’s poems, with their deceptively simple diction, arresting images, and odd juxtapositions, are “vegetable” more in the farmer’s market sense than in Marvell’s: they’re fresh, succulent, bright-colored or richly dark; capable of caressing the palate or peppering it. Their potency resists explanation. You can’t explicate an eggplant, but, like Britt’s poetry, its color and its strangeness linger in the imagination.
—Clarinda Harriss

In Alan Britt’s garden of the mind, “blackberries stain / the pouting lips / of clouds” and fantastic squash “sag [like] yellow udders.” Magically, wind becomes a “lover / with silk bones” and “atonal flutes / leap / from the / catbird’s throat.” Entering these poems like strange, enchanted bowers, we savor with all senses the mystical connections among human, plant and animal. Rapt, we share Britt’s transcendent experiences.
—Christine Boyka Kluge

I have been reading Alan Britt’s poetry now for a decade. His poems are deeply planted in the soil of a rich, intuitive, tellurian, and cosmic love for the flora and fauna of his Southern landscapes, the daily love and labor of a kind, wise soul, and all streaming through the sensibilities of a 21st century poetry imbued with the imaginative leaps and imagery of Lorca, the bare-chested, cosmic idiom and immediacy of Whitman, and the palpitating erotic energy of Neruda, as well as the continued explorations of his poet-peers, such as Duane Locke and Paul B. Roth. Vegetable Love is a dynamic addition to his many collections and chapbooks; in said volume, the reader can look forward to the leaves, birds, hips, dark goblets of wine, and insects that populate his outstanding poetry. The world he reveals to us exists in that garden between sleep and awakening, between this reality and the one that flashes into sight once in a while, leaving us all the better for it.
—Anthony Seidman

Alan Britt has contributed numerous poems and essays to journals published in the U.S. and abroad. His recent books include Vermilion, Infinite Days, Amnesia Tango, and Bodies of Lightning. His poetry appears in the anthologies American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Ltd.: 2009; Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), Hofstra University Press/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru: 2008; and Fathers: Poems About Fathers, St. Martin’s Press: 1998. He teaches Engish/Creative Writing at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.