The Unequivocality of a Rose
by Joel Netsky
Cover Art by Patrick Fisher
2006/07 Slim Volume Series Selection
Published by Poetic Matrix Press
80 pages, Price $15.00
ISBN-13 978-09789597-1-5
Available through Amazon.com
Description
The Book
from the Preface
The Unequivocality of a Rose by Joel Netsky is a story. All good poetry
tells a story; some poems are stories told in grand poetic language like the great
epics of our shared cultural history; some poems are individual pieces set together
to create a story. The Unequivocality of a Rose is a story told both in individual
verse strung together and as a long tale told with a unique poetic language.
...this work confounds and teaches all in the same moment. Joel Netsky's poetic
is firmly grounded in a classic poetic language and yet with a language reaching
out into a visionary future. At first it will perplex you and then it will draw
you in with a sure recognition from another time and another future.
Joel Netsky
Joel was born in Philadelphia. While at college he studied literature and writing,
and in the years following developed a personal poetry writing style based upon
a naturalistic rendering of poetic structures.
"I then became ‘religious': life metamorphosed to a spiritual journey. This is not
to say that I attained any insights beyond the mundane, but life to me from then
on became aspiration toward a supernal. I did very little writing during that time,
worked more on myself internally, and only gradually did I return to writing." Joel
currently resides in Philadelphia.
From The Unequivocality of a Rose:
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How Quietly the Waters
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It Wasn't too Late
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How quietly the waters of the creek flow!
They are like a thought through the consciousness.
The dialectic of field and forest is of such splendor,
the dichotomy between spoken and written, space and time, dissolves.
To the sky, that intellect of perfect erudition,
the text beneath is by a pen indesecrate.
The innumerous cosmoses drift one into the next,
nonrememberable, faceless, yet precious.
In the arms of the communion of all,
intellect and will, stasis and flux: love.
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It wasn't too late to salvage his life,
to make of his years,
If not a palace, then an ordinary house,
to have each day be,
if not a feast, then a simple meal.
How could he have been so benighted?
What affliction had circumscribed his being?
In heinous league upon the fair shore
had jackal bewilderment and vulture despair disgorged
and with stroke so deliquescent as to contradistinct all fealty
render his noble soul egrege even to a twain.
If simple and in proportion,
the proper thing in the proper place at the proper time,
like a farmer with a field,
plowing at the proper time,
or a tailor with a garment,
mending in the proper way–
no, it wasn't too late at all.
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