HAVING ALREADY INVENTED THE GREEKS by Sherod Santos
A poem from The Burning World by Sherod Santos, read by John Coats
Nothing much left to talk about
beyond the iron law the hero
butchered on the battlefield pierced
through the tendons ankle-
to-heel no different now
an outcrop of cloud a sense of place
of blood-spill spreading in parabolic loops
the warhorse drags the hero round
and thereby leaves the ill-starred
man-at-arms unsung
will the story never stop
to read our minds to mark our place
in the margins and set aside
the wayward gods clairvoyants made
a metaphor for who we are?
The Burning World by Sherod Santos (Arrowsmith Press)
In this ground-breaking new collection, award-winning poet Sherod Santos takes on a subject not often scaled to the measure of the lyric poem. In a radical departure from his early work, he has composed a book from scraps, fragments, disconnected images drawn from the ruins of warring conflicts dating back in time to the ancient Greeks and forward to the modern world. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic picture of history’s unending cycle of catastrophe, what has now become a commonplace in our world: “Another flag, another ruin, another marble god. / Another man’s version of the Promised Land.”
There is nothing journalistic, or documentary, or polemical about The Burning World, nor is history reducible to Santos’s own personal and political views. The impression the book leaves us with is that the compulsion for war lies within us, at the very core of human nature.
Purchase here.
Poet, playwright and translator, Sherod Santos is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Square Inch Hours. A National Book Award, New Yorker Book Award and National Book Critics Award Finalist, in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at several universities in the United States and was Poet-in-Residence at the former Poets’ House in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He currently lives in Santa Fe, where he works with a hunger relief program serving nine counties in Northern New Mexico.
Reader: John Coats has a Bachelor's degree, an M.Div from Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal), and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. Having served eight years as a parish priest in Texas and California, he joined a startup training organization, The Life Training, now called More To Life. After fifteen years as a principal speaker and trainer in the United States, Britain, and South Africa, John left the program and worked the next eight years as a management consultant. He is the author of Original Sinners, Why Genesis Still Matters (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2009), a non-religious exploration of the characters in the Book of Genesis. From 2014-2021, he was a fiction editor and book reviewer for Consequence Magazine.