I didn’t know I would run out of time to memorize
your voice. After three days trying, I just now remember
the name of a trombonist I heard three years ago,
and you have been missing 3,322 days.
Dad laughed when I asked for the recording of you
saying no one is home right now with your wine-sopped,
grass-pure voice. I can’t remember it at all, that voice.
Not the strange wide way you had of stretching Ws
or the laugh that started from a precise small thing
and rolled on and on, expanding into time
we didn’t realize was ending.
Or the way you called to us, your voice becoming
a near shriek in the almost dark, our names as large as puppets
expected to move back into that box of home again.
Or how you said Dad. Just that one word.
How you cried at the supper table some nights,
your voice turning into salt and red breath.
How you moaned gently. How your voice in my hands
expired into something I could no longer hear,
something smaller than atoms.
— “A Precise Small Thing”
The poems in This Business of Wisdom suggest a syllabus of the lessons each human faces “as you grow, persistent but clumsy, into your bones.”
With sometimes playful, often pointed language, the author draws upon nature, music, dreams and current events to illustrate how to gain one’s place in the world.
Chaos can be met with patience and perseverance. Despite obstacles, dangers and painful losses, the poet shows us how what we see can be trusted.
With this first volume of poetry, Lauren Camp focuses a prismatic lens on the ragged aesthetic of society, and by doing so, constructs an educated view of life.
“She takes us on wisdom’s precise road trip, where the emotional and daily news collide, and the personal and political cohabit and provide counterpoint. And we are willing travelers.”
— Joan Logghe
Raised in New York, Lauren Camp has lived in a rural village south of Santa Fe, New Mexico since 1994.
She spends part of each week writing, producing and broadcasting “Audio Saucepan,” an hour of eclectic music and words, for KSFR-FM Public Radio.
She is also an accomplished visual artist – creating fiber portraits, sculptures and mixed-media work. Her series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” was exhibited in ten museums in the U.S. over a four-year period. Many of her works have been commissioned, collected and exhibited by hospitals, museums, cultural centers, U.S. embassies, and other public places.
