Book by Daniel Lusk

The Shower Scene from Hamlet

(Maple Tree Editions, 2017)

In The Shower Scene from Hamlet poet Daniel Lusk is at his mature best, creating portraits and literary collages from the lives of artists, eccentrics, and famous public figures that ricochet across a millennium of the world’s art and cultural history. The poet blends extraordinary facts and rumors about personalities long dead with intimate glimpses of his own peripatetic past for the enjoyment of readers.

Review by Sadie Williams, Seven Days

Segments from three of the poems in this book

Why is this goatman in a tree beside his lover's
darkened window? Voices

an angel a chicken from the sky from the ground
who is not freed by laughter and a song?

—from “Call It Fondness” after Marc Chagall

Beardsley sits over a glass of milk
at one of the quieter cafes.

Public women flower in doorways
show their petal thighs banter
with bartenders passing barristers priests…

—from “Pigalle Sketches”

Let us call her Madonna Earhart,
who taught us how life is a cloud
and easily lost.

This woman is the landscape of my drawing.
Here are twin sheep, and here
the foxes of my dreams, near a place
made holy before the Christians came.

—from “Even to the Next”