Day for Night : Poems 1993-1999

Product Description Day for Night is an inventory of the metropolis: a street atlas, a field guide, a calendar of days and nights passed in New York City. With cinematic immediacy, the moment is held in color and light; the poet sees the universal in its luminous particulars--the composition of sundown against the Empire State Building, paper valentines in a Chelsea diner window, the big blue whale in the Museum of Natural History. A love song to the city, these poems are at once nostalgic and sharply aware of the present and its inevitable passing. "The light keeps changing," observes the poet, "I clutch every tender detail of these days." Review "The contents of Griffin Hansbury's Day for Night read like snippets of black and white film noir... We find a director's keen eye, quite passionate and concerned about how exactly we view his image of cosmopolitan New York City." --Lambda Book Report "Fully plugged into the contemporary scene, Griffin Hansbury's poems are tingling with the voltage of city culture." -Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003"Day for Night is a strikingly good and compassionate book." --Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls About the Author Griffin Hansbury's holds a masters degree from the Creative Writing Program of New York University. He is the recipient of a 1999 artists fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts and was a semi-finalist for the Discovery/The Nation prize in poetry. He has also been awarded the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Prize and has twice received awards from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. THREE POEMS Omitted Commas (for Professor Spurlock) At the end of the day a woman calls from Pennsylvania-- an English professor--to let us know our textbook has omitted commas after several introductory subordinate clauses in Joyce's short story, "Araby. We open our books and she reads to me from one page where it is "street light" when it ought to be "street, light" and continues so "winter came dusk" becomes "winter came, dusk." I write it all down, make a note to the editor, thank her for taking the time. She says she has to run to Harrisburg. In the background, I can hear what sounds like a washing-machine humming and a barking dog in the yard. She says, "I hope you don't find this pedantic." I say, "No, no--it's my job," and think she might be pretty. After she says goodbye, I read on to myself until the boy's palms tremble to think of the strange girl; until, longing, he murmurs to her absence, "O love! O love!" I put the book down and hear the woman say the pretty words again: "street, light, winter, dusk." We'll never touch. I do not know her; only the sound of her hurrying to Harrisburg; in her voice, the worry over how these words should be taken; and what matters to her: pauses in thought, breath, timing. The comma says: stop here, breathe, and resume. Hymn to East River Sung While Looking at OKeeffes East River from the Shelton Everyones wild about the Hudson, the lordly Hudson; there are hymns, poems, numerous portraits of that lumbrous ancient length-- but where are the prayers to East River? Its blacker, yes, more poisonous than its ever-famous other half which, if it were called the West River, might not be so famous. Bill wont paint it. He prefers the west with its sunsets. Im a sunset man, he says, Im a cloud man. I tell him, You should see how the sun comes up in the East over the high copper steeples of Saint Stanislaus, orange light of October humming brick and stone. I dont do the dawn, he says. The East River is all about the dawn-- Apollo with his golden disk and chariot roaring across the heavens, over the East River, lordly too, the East River filled with tugs and the fountainous fire-boats breathing their silvery arcs of water to the water. Across the way is Pepsi-Cola, red and thunderous in antique neon; Domino Sugar, heaped in swe