Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker Book

Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what's got away in my life -
Was enough to carry me thru.
- Untitled (pg. 7)

Lorine Niedecker. One of the forgotten women of American poetry. Her work has survived thanks in part to Cid Corman, editor of this selection and, according to the Introduction, "her literary executor [...] because she knew I deeply shared her desire to let her work be known".

The Granite Pail includes a selection of Niedecker's early poems ( My Friend Tree ), along with poems from North Central and Harpsichord & Salt Fish ...
My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun
- Untitled from My Friend Tree (pg. 4)


In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock

*

Iron the common element of earth
in rock and freighters

Sault Sainte Marie - big boats
coal-black and iron-ore-red
topped with what white castlework

The waters working together
internationally
Gully playing both sides

*

Radisson:
'a laborinth of pleasure'
this world of the Lake

Long hair, long gun

Fingernails pulled out
by Mohawks

*

(The long canoes)

'Birch Bark
and white Sedar
for the ribs'

*

Through all this granite land
the sign of the cross

Beauty: impurities in the rock

*

And at the blue ice superior spot
priest-robed Marquette grazed
azoic rock, hornblende granite
basalt the common dark
in all the Earth

And his bones of such is coral
raised up out of his grave
were sunned and birch-bark-floated
to the straits

*

Joliet

Entered the Mississippi
Found there the paddleball catfish
comes down from The Age of Fishes

At Hudson Bay he conversed in latin
with an Englishman

To Labrador and back to vanish
His funeral gratis - he'd played
Quebec's Cathdedral organ
so many winters

*

Ruby of corundum
lapis lazuli
from changing limestone
glow-apricot red-brown
carnelian sard

Greek named
Exodus-antique
kicked up in America's
Northwest
you have been in my mind
between my toes
agate

*

Wild pigeon

Did not man
maimed by no
stone-fall

mash the cobalt
and carnelian
of that bird

*

Schoolcraft left the Soo - canoes
US pennants, masts, sails
chanting canoemen, barge
soldiers - for Minnesota

Their South Shore journey
as if Life's -
The Chocolate River
The Laughing Fish
and The River of he Dead

Passed peaks of volcanic thrust
Hornblende in massed granite
Wave-cut Cambrian rock
painted by soluble mineral oxides
wave-washed and the rains
did their work and a green
running as from copper

Sea-roaring caverns -
Chippewas threw deermeat
to the savage maws
'Voyageurs crossed themselves
tossed a twist of tobacco in'

*

Inland then
beside the great granite
gneiss and then schists

to the resolent pondy lakes'
lilies, flag and Indian reed
'through which we successfully
passed'

*

The smooth black stone
I picked up in the true source park
the lead beside it
once was stone

Why should we hurry
home

*

I'm sorry to have missed
Sand Lake
My dear one tells me
we did not
We watched a gopher there
- Lake Superior from North Central (pg. 58-62)


Where the arrows
of the road signs
lead us:

Life is natural
in the evolution
of matter

Nothing supra-rock
about it
simply

butterflies
are quicker
that rock

Man
lives hard
on this stone perch

by sea
imagines
durable works

in creation here
as in the centre
of the world

let's say
of art
We climb

the limestone cliffs
my skirt dragging
an inch below
[...]
- Wintergreen Ridge from North Central (pg. 77)


He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine

and yet
stand up
- Thomas Jefferson, IX from Harpsichord & Salt Fish (pg. 97)


As I nurse my pump

The greatest plumber
in all the town
from Montgomery Ward
rode a Cadillac carriage
by marriage
and visited my pump

A sensitive pump
said he
that has at times a proper
balance
of water, air
and poetry
- Nursery Rhyme from Harpsichord & Salt Fish (pg. 101)


His holy
slowly
mulled over
matter
[...]
- Darwin, I from Harpsichord & Salt Fish (pg. 108)