Author Description

<p> <b> <i>The Dropped Hand</i> is an attempt to create poetry that lives in the face of loss.</b> </p><p> <i>The Dropped Hand</i> is an attempt to create poetry that lives in the face of loss. The poems in the second and third of the book's four sections respond directly to two major strokes: the stroke that robbed author Terry Blackhawk's father of his ability to read or write and left him with a limited capacity for verbal expression; and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed Blackhawk's mother not long thereafter.</p><p>Underlying the poems in <i>The Dropped Hand</i> is an unspoken echo of Keats's famous fragment: "This living hand . . ." The book's two central metaphors-the hand (the hand that plays or is played, that signals, that makes music, that connects us to one another) and the bridge of language and interaction-interplay, bounce off, and resonate with one another throughout the book. The bridge also spans water-the unconscious, the unifying mystery-which is a recurring motif and connects the first and last sections of the book.</p><p>Blackhawk's poems display a range of form, including prose poems, sonnets, sestinas, and invented forms. Elegy is a central impulse of the poems in this book. Another is to heal, retrieve and recover language-whether broken by grief or lost to stroke and aging-to create in words something that will last. The first section of the book ("Over the Stage") entwines motifs of animals, art and spectacle-elephants, horses, turtles, and fish mix with visual art, circus, theater, poetry, and film-with childhood, preparing in a sense the way for the losses of the mother's music and the father's language.</p><p>Linda Gregerson writes, "Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: 'abrupt and final / silence.' If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a