The Cuckoo

The winner of this year's Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Glück. It is Glück's first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus's art for it "nonsense and mystery," its "mesmerizing beauty" and "luminous high-mindedness." THE DUNG PILE The varied voices of crows rose and fell. As I lay in the grass, dark- Eyed juncos flew down beside me, flittering and twittering, and gleaned the mustard seed fallen onto my body. Their black beads and death hoods. Their white coat tails. I whispered to Surely it is you who make the honey of which the Berber speak, honey which they secret from your nest in the dreamy hours of the haze, lining their throats each morning as if with a paste of fire ant stings, or do you make the mists which tangle into clouds through the mountains to the south of ranches? They continue to eat from me. One picked out an oat seed, another, a blade of bluestem.