Slow Boat to Samoa: haibun of Matthew Caretti
$20.00
“In Slow Boat to Samoa, Matthew Caretti is a master storyteller at work. He tells us two stories — in the first, he is chronicler of place, time and life. In the deeper, layered second, the quality is shamanic, prophetic in its wisdom, restrained in its telling. He shows us the world he inhabits from the points of view of a witness, a lived experience, and the land’s ancestral intelligence.”
— Shobhana Kumar
Description
“At the heart of Matthew Caretti’s new collection of poems is a Buddhist-inflected sense of amor fati, the notion of the acceptance of life that preoccupied some of the Roman Stoics and later Nietzsche. That meditation takes the reader on a journey through a good swath of the South Pacific, of the author’s life there, and ultimately to the question Where is home? Caretti’s language is concentrated, full of sharp imagery, literary allusions, history, Samoan mythology, and memorable haiku. A rich and well-seasoned stew. In the hands of a lesser poet, this book would be 300 pages long.”
— Bob Lucky
Lore
I recall first considering anthropophagy at the Cannibal Café on Taveuni in Fiji. I’d been reading about Cakobau’s conversion and the pardoning thereafter of all those he had vanquished. Over the irony of an oversized burger, I asked a friend about this history, about that great king’s reputed gnawing on a foe’s severed digits while he still lived. He shrugged, saying finally and with a frown, “That was a long time ago.”
a shift
in the wind
sandpipers
From the South Pacific much comes to us still in legend and a murky history of the heretofore man-eaters inhabiting these islands. Some say the foreign missionaries saved the people, in this case both body and soul. Yet there is a folktale known to all in Samoa, word-of-mouth iterations told throughout the archipelago. Supplanting some foreign intervention, a man and wife become turtle and shark.
lava cliffs
first lessons
in love
ISBN: 978-1-958408-68-1
Pages: 128
Size: 6″ x 9″
Binding: perfect softbound
Year Published: 2025
Additional information
| Weight | 0.00 lbs |
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