The bunker in the parsley fields poems - Gildner, Gary (University of Iowa Press, 1997)
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The Bunker in the Parsley Fields takes its cues from the particular music made by an old-fashioned rope swing; from a child ramming a trike over and over against a bomb shelter that is in the way; from a boy bouncing a ball off abandoned chinchilla hutches; from a man and a woman pushing a tremendous stone up a hill, lost between the slope and their shoulders - and once, in the orchard, lost in laughter. Many of the poems, including the title poem, come from the year that Gary Gildner lived in Slovakia. It was 1992-93, when Czechoslovakia split in two, a year of heightened excitement and uncertainty. Gildner and his wife lived in a cement box of a flat like thousands of others cheek by jowl above an abandoned bunker not far from the Tatra Mountains. They returned to a new home in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains, with Elizabeth expecting a child. The ideas of home, settlement, birth, rebirth, the past, the future, direction, luck, what matters, love, and work flow through the poems that shape this book
The swing -- - Cinders -- - Playing catch with my daughter -- - Jury duty -- - Song: one summer afternoon in the country -- - One bright autumn -- - On certain cold days -- - My Polish grandfather -- - The wolverine -- - A late detail from the depression -- - Close to trees -- - A dream in the Carpathians -- - The bunker in the parsley fields -- - Picked out a toka, a stanley -- - The sister -- - Dogtoothed violets -- - In the garden with Margaret -- - The cougar -- - Flicker -- - The great horned owl -- - Lavina -- - Collecting cowpies -- - The stone -- - Delicately in small measure -- - A lullaby -- - Prayer -- - In St. Peter's Home for Nuns -- - Skookumchuck -- - Umbels -- - I call my mother -- - Josef of Moravia -- - Sunday morning: Marilee combs her red hair -- - In Puerto Rico, she says