Willing Victims

John Nold

6 X 9 inches, 64 pages

CONCERNED WITH SUCH TRADITIONAL SUBJECTS as the relationships between men and women and nature, these poems seem familiar, yet are strangely new, generated by moments when sharp sensory perception and external and internal reality intensely fuse. With fine technical skill, syntactic innovation, and exact imagery, these lyrics are a record of revelations that lie continually below the surface of ordinary existence.

I am unusually calm tonight


          green darkness


crouches


up among limbs and branches of trees


overhanging the street, trees


office towers have risen above



—I step along with a total stranger.


She wears her face soft,


a beautiful mask

                    but speaks so easily, so unafraid

that we are soon lost


in a landslide of dismembered bodies


bombs and statistics.


And I almost forget




it was only her alluring figure, her sensual step


led me along side her in the first place 

John Nold

Author

John Nold lives in London, Ontario. Willing Victims is his third collection of poetry. His first book, Open Squares, was published by Coach House Press (1982).