The Shower Scene from Hamlet
Maple Tree Editions, 2017
In The Shower Scene from Hamlet poet Daniel Lusk is at his mature best, creating portraits and literary collages from the lives of artists, eccentrics, and famous public figures that ricochet across a millennium of the world’s art and cultural history. The poet blends extraordinary facts and rumors about personalities long dead with intimate glimpses of his own peripatetic past for the enjoyment of readers.
This book can be purchased at Phoenix Books on Amazon and at independent bookshops everywhere.
Segments from three of the poems in this book
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Why is this goatman in a tree beside his lover's darkened window? Voices an angel a chicken from the sky from the ground who is not freed by laughter and a song?
—from “Call It Fondness” after Marc Chagall
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Beardsley sits over a glass of milk at one of the quieter cafes. Public women flower in doorways show their petal thighs banter with bartenders passing barristers priests…
—from “Pigalle Sketches”
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Let us call her Madonna Earhart, who taught us how life is a cloud and easily lost. This woman is the landscape of my drawing. Here are twin sheep, and here the foxes of my dreams, near a place made holy before the Christians came.
—from “Even to the Next”