Charms Against Lightning

James Arthur

James Arthur is known to compose in his head while walking, and the music of those footfalls and wandering skips can be heard throughout this exhilarating debut collection of poems.
 
With lush and concise images, Arthur conveys the eerie wonder of awakening to the intimate revelations delivered from solitude—the specter of death in the far distance, the expanses between even the closest people, the world as seen by a traveler abroad. History, politics, and place are integrated and integral parts of the whole, yet Arthur invites the reader to plunge into the mysteries and uncertainties within everyday moments: “Can a man build a tower / out of air alone? He can. And the wind / will blow it away.”

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ISBN: 9781556593871

Format: Paperback

Utopia

Now he’s found his own city, a postcard place
that anyone would like, backlit by the romance
of an unknown history. Here, sheets and hair
perfume the air, every gate is hammered silver,
every song, a song and dance, and the balloon seller

bares her ivory shoulder for a kiss.
The man, who’s spent enormously to feed a fantasy
of being from no place—spent what he had,
and borrowed more—now is completely happy

except for an idea of an idea, which he cannot outpace,
that somehow he may have missed something
that he should not have missed, though no doubt
that is better than lying on a cold suburban beach

admiring stars so far away, he’d be seeing them
as they were before the dawn of human speech.
This is another country, not an ordinary place,
where a man, no matter how exceptional
he felt, would finally be erased.

About the Author

Canadian-American poet James Arthur is the author of The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, …

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Reviews

“An entrenched strangeness exists in Arthur’s work, derived not from linguistic hijinks but from common observations … his tone is casual and confident, the effect slightly off-frame or out of focus, yet constantly arresting.” —The Believer

“This is one of those poems—we get them once in a while—where, you know, we don’t know who the poet is, and you see this poem, and you go ‘Who is this? How did they do that?’ This poem seems to me to have just come seamlessly from someone’s mind. It’s very intense.” —Don Share, discussing “The Land of Nod” in the Poetry Magazine Podcast