Publisher: Publishers Group West

Copyright Date: 2016

Edition Date: 2016 Release Date: 11/15/16

Pages: ix, 75 pages

ISBN: 1-944211-26-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-944211-26-4

Dewey: 811

Dimensions: 22 cm.

Subject Heading:
Grief. Poetry.

Language: English

Reading Level: 7.0

Interest Level: 9+

Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.

Part I.
Winter night full of stars
Where is all this water coming from?
Self-pity is better than no pity at all
It was not of the moon we dreamt
Umbrian anecdotes
O, the sadness immaculate
Not all skeletons are museum quality
A moral victory is still a defeat
Poem written on the first anniversary of my father's death
After the obsequies, etc.
Eulogy (currently in revision)
Meditation on a poem currently in revision
Sonnet on consequence
May 25
Part II.
Excerpts from the unabridged history of rainfall
Birds are how the Earth makes sense of Heaven
Elegy for the living
The grove
The ranges of birds
Beauty is a real thing, I've seen it
What this poem means
Alarums. flourishes. exeunt.
From a window
Elegy
Glose
The pallbearer
Jazz funeral
Cloud chanty
Part III.
Epigraph
The rooster king
The coast road.