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Author’s Preface

I would like readers of this volume to think of it as a lifetime book, not of the lifetime of the writer but of the reader, hence a book to be read over time, to dip in and out of. For me, it has been a form for truth and defiance, begun in joy and verbal music, in the face of the inevitability of death and the kaleidoscopic nature of perception. It is life amid the dark matter and sticky stuff. It voices a way to live there.

I have been asked if I am the Dead Man. No, but he knows a lot about me. Are the poems chock-full of autobiography? Yes, but it is not presented as such and asks no credit. The Dead Man is not a persona but an overarching consciousness. He is alive and dead at once, defeating time.

I waited four years after writing the first Dead Man poem, or perhaps being found by it, before writing another. A couple more, and the form had hooked me with its music and capacity. I wrote the first of these poems at age fifty-three and the last at age eighty-one. Blessings on the reader who leans forward.

A note about what is included here. Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems incorporates only the first four of the twenty-four poems from the 2011 book Whiteout, a volume of Dead Man poems written in response to photographs by Nathan Lyons. I felt that those four (“Light Skeleton,” “Big Eyes,” “Whiteout,” and “The Palm”) could stand alone, as they did in 2011 in Vertigo, while the other twenty are best read in direct relation to the photos to which they responded.

M. B.