NOTES

CALL

“Damned if dog-daisies beanstalks didn’t fank up in the spokes” adapts language from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Bann Valley Eclogue.”

The epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Monument.”

POKE: A small sack; a clutch of things ( or people ).
CROWDERS: Greener-tasting cousins to the black-eyed pea, pretty much rampant through the Carolina hot months. So-named for the cramped living conditions within their pods.

“Where springs not fail” is a quotation from “Heaven-Haven” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“Had I a hundred mouths” comes down from Virgil ( 70 BCE–19 BCE ) by way of William Goyen ( 1915–1983 ).

The phrase “the rocky breasts forever” is drawn from “At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop.

RADICLE: The embryonic root of a plant; the rootlike beginning of a nerve or vein; the rudimentary particle of anything; a primary atom or element. Charles and Francis Darwin in The Power of Movement in Plants (1880): “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [ with sensitivity ] and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.”

CROODLE: The low faint music of birds ( to coo as a dove ); the humming of a tune.

The poem leans upon Emily Dickinson’s poem #861 “Split the Lark” and quotes the line “Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled.”

TETSU: Japanese; iron. Also a given name. Usually for boys, sometimes used ( with or without suffixes ) for girls.
SOFU: Japanese; grandfather.

The epigraph derives from the Wallace Stevens poem “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun.”

The phrase “a shift in the structure of experience” quotes from “The Displaced of Capital” by Anne Winters.

The “root-room” formulation comes from a sonnet by G. M. Hopkins, “My own heart let me more have pity on”:

. . . call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

The epigraph is drawn from Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray—his translated version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne.

CRAMPLE-GROUND: A patch of woodland where roots, stems, and vines are known to cramble ( creep along the ground or intertwine underfoot ) and are thus trod upon and trampled.

“Leafwhelmed” is borrowed from Hopkins’s 1888 “Epithalamion.”

“A little room for turmoil to grow lucid in” is adapted from Amy Clampitt’s poem “Losing Track of Language.”

“Let loose the bale that bows us down” adapts a phrase from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred; or, The New Crusade.