House of Words

"Build me a house of words, / A house of how and why, / and I will live in it with you/ Under the silent sky, / For we will tell each other/ Things we would deny/ And believe them by and by." Jonathan Potter's House of Words is a collection of poems arranged in four movements echoing the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet. Each poem here represents a single stressed syllable pursed between lips, cobbling pillar and post, rafter and roof, where stars are nails and the night is a hammer falling. The book opens in wonder, dwelling in a world in which words and the gestures of language provide access to the freshness deep down things. But even in that initial movement, a gap is evident which grows as it confronts contradiction and death. Subdued recedings of resignation follow, tentatively emerging into the light of faith. House of Words is the inaugural publication of Korrektiv Press.