The Reinvention of the Human Hand

Paul Vermeersch's new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body's experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the acclaimed author of Burn, The Fat Kid, and Between the Walls. Vermeersch has always gone in search of understanding. Now his discoveries speak of a human world exhausted by its divorce from an animal past, terrified of retreating into early places it never truly left, astonished by the forgotten possibilities disclosed there.

I
The Painted Beasts of Lascaux
A Scorpion in Alcohol
Ode to Amoeba proteus
Bosch Landscape 2010
Hands
The Formation of the Pack
Altarpiece with False Teeth and Parkinson’s Disease
The Sadness Will Last Forever
Twenty-one Days with a Baboon Heart
Another Effect of Global Warming
Elegy for Paul Winchell
Ape
Boys Who Envy Werewolves
 
II
I Am Happy to Live in an Age of Plenty
Basic Instructions for Anaesthesia
Old Punk
Prayer to a Saint
Smoke
In the Glorious Absence of Gods
Last of the Blondes
The Threatened Swan
Ringtones
Prosthetic Leg in Storage
A Photograph of the Human Retina
 
III
Sorrow for Frogsong
In Joseph Merrick’s London
The Marriage of the Nuclei
Dogstar
Love as an Argument in Theoretical Physics
A Glass Eye Finds Its Purpose
The Reinvention of the Human Hand
He Considers the Possibility that None of This Is Real
This Is Where Your Life Begins
Three Anthropomorphic Studies
Beautiful and Swift
The Demolition of Heaven
Cloud Formation like a Map of the World
Lost Things
 
Notes
Acknowledgements