A rich debut collection from a promising new poet -- selected by Campbell McGrath as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competition For more than twenty-five years, the National Poetry Series has sought out and discovered new voices, helping to launch the careers of such luminaries as the former poet laureate Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez. “Rapturously lyrical and whip smart, Camille Norton does not choose between a poetry of sensual detail and a poetry of intellectual rigor, she marries the two. . . . Beautifully crafted, deeply reflective, Corruption is a marvelous and uncompromising book.” - Campbell McGrath A rich debut collection from a promising new poet -- selected by Campbell McGrath as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competition For more than twenty-five years, the National Poetry Series has sought out and discovered new voices, helping to launch the careers of such luminaries as the former poet laureate Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez. Camille Norton is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Her previous awards include the Grolier Prize in Poetry, the Derek Bok Award for Teaching, and the Eberhardt Teacher-Scholar Award. She is coeditor of Resurgent: New Writing by Women ; her recent work has appeared in Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The Colorado Review, Tiferet, Iris, Exphrasis, The White Pelican Review, The Gail Scott Reader, and How2, an online journal of women and experimental writing. Corruption Poems By Camille Norton HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2006 Camille Norton All right reserved. ISBN: 0060799137 The Green Baize Table I wanted the pear because it was green, the same green as the baize of the banker's table in a painting by Quintin Metsys, The Banker and His Wife (1514) and because it was the color of a young girl's bodice in a portrait by Cranach, the color of Renaissance materialism purling over the surface of the visible. In the painting by Metsys, the green baize table is covered in florins, silver counterweights, and pearls as if the table itself were the occasion for capital. How green and planted with meaning is the green baize table, how natural a green, how like a pear or an apple, a green as lush, as fertile as God's Providence for the coming plantation of the New World. The faces of the banker and his wife are patient, smoothed by piety. They are waiting for all we possess: the traffic in things and in bodies, the real, the virtual heft and texture of our material. He sits at the green baize table counting coins. She sits beside him, turning the pages of her breviary. But her eyes are all on him and the money and in the Netherlandish light one can see how much is changing, how everything in this room is already a commodity: the books, the pearls, the silver plate, the oval mirror in which we can't stop looking at ourselves. Continues... Excerpted from Corruption by Camille Norton Copyright © 2006 by Camille Norton. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.