Pelican Tracks Poems by Elton Glaser   March 2003 ISBN 0-8093-2516-0, $14.95 paper 80 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry   The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry John Tribble, series editor Pelican Tracks is a book of poems with a homing instinct. Elton Glaser travels a restless circuit between his native Louisiana and his adopted home of Ohio, from the “spice and license of the lowlands” to the “streets of Akron cobbled in ice.” These reflections, leavened with a fierce wit and moving bravura of language, are extracted from the origins and ends of the poet’s life—his birth in the final spasms of the second World War, the fears and excitements of youth, the death of parents, and the unexpected losses of adulthood. Marking his tracks between the Pelican State and the Buckeye State, Glaser records the damaged beauty of “everything sinking, everything rising again in the mind.”    “Elton Glaser's Pelican Tracks offers us an intimate and intricate portrait of gritty down-home life in Louisiana. The characters and places that populate this book reveal lives thoroughly lived and remind us that whoever and whatever surrounds us quietly invades us—in the best and perhaps worst sense of the word—and, finally, becomes us. Glaser observes ravenously and lovingly; these poems are beautifully detailed. In fact, reading these poems is not like reading really, more like watching and listening—the way we might engage a good film. There is no frivolous decoration here, no breading, just meat—no foam, just beer: dark and rich with a sharp bite after every swig. This is a singing that is both playfully and painfully desperate—like good blues, an embodied music that knows how to move gracefully between hard times and fat times.” —Tim Seibles, author of Hammerlock and Hurdy-Gurdy   “These beautifully made poems—rich as redeye gravy, crystalline as Ohio ice—will delight anyone seeking a fresh understanding of the American soul. Elton Glaser is a stellar lyric poet, a true witness to the immanence that is everywhere. He’s also a folklorist, weaving vivid stories of his native New Orleans: the music of the ‘Only Female Cornetist in the Tenderloin’ and the ‘Worst High School Marching Band in the South.’ The pine straw and fire ants, dirty rice and champagne are here, as are ‘Mister Jelly Lord, the creole snoot’ and “Miss Moment . . . hamhock of a woman.’ Glaser is a national treasure. His poems are at once gritty and reverent, profound and comic. If you worry for the fate of literature, read this book and take heart.” —Alice Fulton, author of Felt and Sensual Math     Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron and editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. He has published four full-length collections of poems: Relics, Tropical Depressions, Color Photographs of the Ruins, and Winter Amnesties. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry and Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry.  He coedited, with William Greenway, I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio.    Dead Reckoning   I’m done with The abundance of winter, so full of itself, The air no more than snow And the earth no less, nothing multiplied Zero by zero, until I can’t take it, I can’t Keep my mind from skating away Somewhere south, as the ice melts To blue and green and a red-tailed hawk Riding the air, broken summer Of the sun’s division, where the world Comes back again, piece by piece, And I see my shadow Split the shore, walking the dark Tideline between the beaten sand And a thousand white arousals of the sea.