LEFTOVER ORDINARY by Scott King

Restoring the prairie

Wanting to recreate the Great Plains, he clears one corner of his backyard.
Ornamental shrubs are cut down. Lillies dug up.
He listens to the sound the shovel makes. And each time he presses it into
the earth he hears a burning match quenched in water.
Out of his pocket he takes great handfuls of seed and fluff gathered on long
walks into the country and the past.
He sows thistle, goldenrod, prairie grasses big and small, asters and smoke.
Where long ago a fenceline stood, he plants chokecherries, wild plum,
hazelnuts. Later,
from his porch, he watches and waits and imagines-quite confident blue
sky, prairie hawk, buffalo will all return.

In this collection by Scott King, his first full-length book, the poems are triggered by the most ordinary events and sights, what Scottish poet Norman McCaig refers to as "unemphatic marvels." Then, almost inevitably, the poems leap into the realm of the surreal and the unexpected. The first section & the monologue were written over a period of several months and spring from a determined effort to write poems in the long-lined, daily manner of the modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. The third section collects poems written off-and-on afterward in this manner, short groupings that arrived like flashbacks to the earlier effort. Each poem is given the date & place of first draft.