A Birdsong Stems the Tide is the debut book by Matthew Bottiglieri. With poignant writing and a gift for grafting the melodies of odes of old with emotions of today, Bottiglieri is sure to stir and inspire poetry in the souls of readers around the world.

It begins and ends with words. Words grafted upon images. Art informed by the pulp of terse sentences. Light blooming in the joy of an empty heart. Long days of truancy sharpening pencils into arrowheads and stringing bows with necklaces of blistered sunlight. The myth called me from a place of scales and feathers. Of horrifying reflections and maidens chained to damp stones. It echoed from Atlantean waves and lost dreams of gold, porphyry, and other occult joys. Books. Art. Profanity and a steady diet of comics. Superheroes, mostly. There were films, of course, and thousands of albums. Punk rock. Bad Brains. Northern California thrash metal. Miles Davis. Coltrane. Wes Montgomery sliding thumbs across molasses. A joy birthed from the agony of failure. The falling and the breaking. The lost boulevards and the acerbic voice of Burroughs. The junky saint. The mad shaman of the final chapter. Skinheads pounding the gates. The filth and the fury. Puerile dreams of arches and redhead babysitters. Nevermind the Bollocks. Blisters. Plains. Shields of saddened stars and trips to desolate cities. It's all in there. The compost and the dregs. The underachievement. Wrestling my way through my teenage years. The long runs through the dark. Churning my innards as I died for water to calm my blistered throat. There were the swords. The fist fights in the school hallways. The epileptic fugues. The boxing. There was, of course, skeletal Irving Feldman. The living ghost who encouraged me to lace my shoes and step on the mat. Of course, there's Creeley. Wodan. The father of terse, honest language. The voice I had no idea that I longed to hear. Susan Howe taught me to write honestly for the dead - those who can neither see nor hear. She taught me that a poem lives two lives. It buys real estate on the page. It also lives in our ears and hearts. It

sings to us from its cenotaph. I didn't understand her work until I visited Boston's Granary Cemetery. Her poems became epitaphs. Scratched out grave rubbings. Palimpsests and imprecations. John Yau pried open the door and showed me the way forward. Surrealism. Images. Meanings-within-meanings. I loved his words so much that they threatened to become my words. I lovingly placed him aside so that I could find my own voice. I stopped speaking for twenty years, so that I could speak as cleanly as a bell. The journey continues. I visit John, from time to time. We speak as though we're old friends. We are, in a sense. It always comes back to the word, though. The primal talisman. It begins and ends with words. Vessels. Contagion. One image bleeding into another. An ugly beauty, to quote Monk. An ugly sadness that stirs me like the threads of a bow. Music. A voice breaking as it scrapes across Lethe. Old ghosts. Bones. Feathers. Paint. Words. Sounds.