Ted Bernal Guevara

In Birds on Elephant ($15, 6X9″, 70pp, Print ISBN: 978-1-68114-002-5, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-111-4, EBook ISBN: 978-1-68114-084-1, LCCN: 2014959352; May 2015; Purchase on Amazon or Barnes and Noble), all of the landscape is an allusion, and “we borrow or skim on [it], and our work becomes more fertile.” Each poem in the collection either perches on a great work or a famed poet, or has first words that make a sentence if read downward—as in:

Across and Down

Frame your memory so I could see it tomorrow.

Your place in mine has gone off with the tide.

Memory is not quite the warmth that was once on me.

So gather the particles and weigh in; it’s not too dispersed.

I will look up and fly the gossamer of you yesterday.

Could you withstand the mind without the frame?

See it against the sea.

It will elevate with the sun. I’ll just diminish

tomorrow.

Ted Bernal Guevara divides his eagerness, his out-of-bed thrill, into two compartments: Fiction, a rustic room where things are arranged and accessible with a calendar tacked on the wall above his head, and Poetry, the balcony attached to that room.  He hardly urges himself to stand up and walk out. He just does, and the air out there is profoundly fresh. Guevara is the author of Films, a book of 55 poems based on 55 movies, and three novels, A Circle with Two Corners, Days of Slint, and True Feel. He resides in Speedway, Indiana.

Review: “May 2015 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri” included a review of Birds on Elephant in the Washington Independent Review of Books, May 19, 2015.