Jerusalem of Grass

David Axelrod

Axelrod’s clarity of language shines in Jerusalem of Grass. Words hit notes high and sharp, and give us enough, more than enough, in their directness and simplicity. Landscape is always part of these poems, as are the sentiments of things missed, longed for, or needed. Paul Nelson writes, “Axelrod does not use Nature aesthetically to color language or event or situation, or for the state of human discourse, but as the now weird backdrop against which everything human still matters or does not, for him.”

A sample poem from the book

Crossing the Missouri

From the shacks west of Culbertson

light slips out across sprawling wheat

and I huddle under a bridge

to gaze at the river beneath me,

the slow, heavy current

accepting rain and the prairie

that rolls quietly down

toward the riprap shores.

Nothing rises from the black water,

no branch, no torn and mangled wings.

Even the moon is lost. I’ve waited an hour

for the rain to let up, listening to bitterns

call from the rushes, from their damp,

unassailable nests in the dark, upstream.