» In Memoriam

» Art
» Poetry
» Fiction
» Essays
» Reviews

» Contributors

Aaron Tieger's Anxiety Chant

Jeffery Beam

Anxiety Chant. Aaron Tieger. Skysill Press, 2008. 27 pages, $7 (paperback). ISBN: 9781847770059

I spent lunch today with the lovely looking Anxiety Chant and Tieger's words which feel, particularly today, which is rainy and cold like a sit at the window, like a ponder, a pond, of ferreting out—of self's closed doors now ajamb, and then a measured gateway to expose the mind's contraventions. I love the cat therein. And certain moments have struck me as perfect in the way that human things are not 'that' yet are, here demonstrated by fragments taken from wholes:

"all I need as spirit / drifts toward the low tide / of the long ride"

("Moving")


"Lighting on the edge
of clouds      Land
      opens up
  & so

do I"

("Moving")


      "A once lucid sound
  blurred
by string"

("Thinking about feelings")


"in heart
        blue eye
& green mind"

("6/24/05")


"stillness in the midst
of volume
        or
    If you like

surface quiet
subsurface volume"

("6/24/05")


"A falsetto conscience
    reminds me"

("Leaving Wendell")


"Every thick blue dusk"

("July")


    "the light of one bulb
the sound
of one night"

("Locke Hill")


"Cows
    in thin trees
dull leaves"

("10/31/05")

Especially like those cows. But find all of these . . . distinct poems within themselves—but love the way Aaron has made a path of them. Reading this book again over a year later after writing this I could excavate another whole pile of phrases/phrasings. I think the mirror cover just the right thing for anxieties and chants.