On That Point

This is the first parliamentary debate textbook for secondary school students. The text is designed to provide a theoretical and practical foundation for effective participation in parliamentary debate in competition or in the classroom.

Liz Waldner's bold new collection takes its title and its inspiration from Definition 1 of Euclid's Elements of Geometry. Its six sections—point, line, circle, square, triangle, and point again—are explorations of various kinds of longing and loss—sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. Drawing from culture high and low—Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond—these poems offer proof of and proof against the “mortal right-lined circle” of memory and identity. The innocence and Keatsian beauty of Euclid's geometry become poignant from a perspective that encompasses all that is non-Euclidean as well as space, time, and the theory of matter. With rare wit and linguistic daring, Waldner opens resonant channels of communication that show there is indeed more than meets the eye—or the mind—in her poems. Hand to Mouth (Twist and Shout) Cold comes slow up out of the darkness among the leaves that smell so good when bruised Do you, too, recognize me god so soon? Her First Reckoning Pour wine into vessels the violet of woods, wine of the reddening stars. You are god, you can do it. Your lover calls you St. John the Conqueror. I have heard her. This is the name of a root. Asperge the thousands and thousands of rooms in which photosynthesis promises sun to the acolyte cells. Rain yourself on a leaf. Birch. The bark is malleable as mushroom flesh. Show that you know me. Scratch out my name with this tree. My name of trees. On the day I arrive at the door of my death, myself now hard to tell from the trees that had hid it from me, I will demand that you love me. You made me like this. Why did you make me like this? Transitive, Intransitive: Extemporary Measures Two crows above the marsh: sew. Stitch the seventeen sleek shades of blue to the shadow-patterned greens below. See fit to make me a suitable view who having nowhere to else to go might as well wear this world well. Llama necks periscope the view: yonder, across the water, you testing the air now a crow chases a redwing blackbird through. What can I show you who sees I don't believe? For now, what the eye of the needle sees: through through through: clouds, birds, me, trees; soon: in, out, with, to; something moving, something moved: a stitch in time's an avenue, future's sutures' revenue— “the shining hour” improved.

Jim Dean, longtime editor of Wildlife in North Carolina, offers his personal observations on the pleasures and frustrations of hunting, fishing, camping, and other outdoor pursuits. Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite draws together fifty of the best columns that Dean has written for the magazine over the last seventeen years. The witty, sometimes poignant pieces are arranged into a loose chronicle of the sporting year, with a generous allowance for digression: the first is set in April, on the opening day of trout season, and the last tells of a New Year's Day spent alone in a mountain cabin. At first glance, hunting and fishing are the focus of most of the columns. Often, however, Dean is after bigger game. A crab that escapes the pot leads him to reflect on the capricious nature of life. The restoration of a cabin at the old family farm evokes memories of family and simpler times. And a May panfishing trip takes on the quality of ritual, performed by two old friends. The consistent theme uniting all the essays is the celebration of wild places and rural traditions that have become endangered in our modern world.