
The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole
The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole
The Thomas Salto, Timmy Straw’s debut collection, offers what very little poetry in our time seems to manage: work that is both overtly political and unflinchingly aesthetic. Ben Lerner, Brenda Hillman, Jay Wright, Anne Boyer, Chris Nealon are others whose work comes to mind. But Straw’s work marries politics and aesthetics in a way maybe not seen since George Oppen, and the gift of this collection is both the lyric mystery it generates and the position of moral clarity from which it operates. To do this, Straw refuses any neat resolutions that pay lip service to the fashionable pieties—these poems, like Hillman’s or Oppen’s, take those pieties for granted, as background noise, as a starting point at best:
Occasionally,
our freedom intrudes on us
like real sunlight thru a snowglobe
like real sunlight on a painted sun
hot as a fresh-cut tree
as a flung side dappled saw
To turn and see it face to face,
to be
both sight and self
it swings upon
ABBOTT: Since it has historically caused us heartache, I’m going to grab a program with all the players’ names printed in it.
(Abbott leaves)
COSTELLO (to the Grinch, seated next to him): Hey, do you know who is playing today?
GRINCH: Of course I know. They all are. They’re on first, second, the outfield. Everywhere.
COSTELLO: Who is?
GRINCH: Yes. Look at those Whos all dressed in their hats, with their balls and their gloves and their dumb wooden bats.
COSTELLO: Who is dressed in little hats?
GRINCH: I know, I hate it.
COSTELLO: Well, do you know who that is on first?
GRINCH: Sort of. I took his Christmas presents one year.
COSTELLO: You took whose Christmas presents?
GRINCH: Yes, but the Whos got them back.
COSTELLO: Who gave them back?
In May 2021, former prime minister Boris Johnson announced a public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, to be chaired by Baroness Hallett, a crossbench peer and retired former judge. Work for the inquiry began in the spring of 2022, and the first public hearings took place earlier this year. The inquiry has […]
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