Celan

Poetry from AGNI 55 by James Brasfield

There,
the whisper:

gradual breath
fattens

a word, bud
of stem form—

never before
this one,

the return of
the recognizable.

Published: Apr 15 2002

James Brasfield

James Brasfield has published two collections of poems—Ledger of Crossroads (2009) and Infinite Altars (2016), both from Louisiana State University Press—and received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His translation, with the author, of The Selected Poems of Olea Lysheha (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications, 2000) received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. (updated 2018)

AGNI 101