Winner of the Voelcker Award (PEN America) (2016)

In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination are all among the subjects of these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and the manifold connections tying them together. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to those questions.

Roberson's poems range widely through different scales of time and space, invoking along the way history and myth, galaxies and garbage trucks, teapots and the history of photography, mating cranes and Chicago's political machine. This collection is composed of five sequences, each developing a particular constellation of images and ideas related to the vision of the whole. Various journeys become one journey—an epic journey, invoking epic themes. There are songs of creation, pictures of the sorrows of war, celebrations of human labor and human society, a respect for tools and domestic utensils that are well made, the deep background of the past tingeing the colors of the present, and the tragic tones of endings and laments, a pervading awareness of the tears in things. Most of all, there is the exhilaration of a grand, sweeping vision that enlarges our world.

TOPOI
To See the Earth Before the End of the World
Topoi
Morning
Deep Time
Planetarium
Lunar Eclipse
Topoi
Many Locations
The $$-Men
The instant though, is ours
Old Dependency
Proto-pyramid Figure
What Word
We look at the world to see the earth
THE WORLD, THEN
About What's This
The World, Then
The world then
Facing up to
We see the farther away
A haze we can't see by the sky
He wore his glasses
The wall stores
As if all physical display were not that
For all the questions
help / answered with
More than a few seconds after
Teapot Boiling, How to Begin the Day
a clay pot arrives at the table
Clock death on every corner
A wall turned in the fever sun
The flies cleaning their multiple eye
the split in the head
With bushes for thick glasses / But we can see
A thin line drawn on the morning
"There are things that I would otherwise..."
Distance works
spiral galaxies
the level/ some people
A swaying path
The red spot on two mating cranes
Stopped against
The lathe that turns the necks
A cloud is whatever it is
A lamp's fingers
Its 93 million miles •Inside our moment
CHROMATIC SEQUENCES
Chromatic Sequences
Form in early movies – What Color
we were not seeing movement – about the trees bending
Chromatic Spatiality – the spaces of color
1948: Art and Third Grade – not in the Folkways Collection
Darkly
The Metaphor of Impressionism – your skin
advances in latitude – The still green latitude
What the Tree Took, On the Table
Drawing On What is There
Question to the Director
Architectural Drawing
Architectural Program – travel structure
The building is up
the list of if
Profit Fulfilled
Man with Three Degrees •PLAYGROUND AND PARKS DEPARTMENT MUSIC
Egg Gatherers
War Song, Child's Flute
This Year
Nothing New
New World Orchestra
Song
New World Orchestra in the Market of the Weavers
American Jazz Quartet
piano: In the Lobby
bass: Urban Specific
sax: Pick Him Up
drums: Tithes for Charity
Summer boats, migrating
Sight Read on a Couple Stars
(Ring!...)
Transit Authority
Nine Chicago Poems
Flock Life
Nolan, Riding the Bullet Train
Relative Time
Gauntlet
All At Once
Machinery
Centripetal Force
On the Sparrow: No Blame
Sfumato
Playground and Parks Department Music
OF THE EARTH
A Low Bank of Cloud
Watching for the Ancestors
Of The Earth
Song to Anubis
Road Ikon
Run
The Heavens
The Original Deed
Chorus
Tribal Tag
Boy God Quetzalcoatl Water Shape Stood
Last of the Bush Baths
As a tool of the landscape… / (staying in school)
Feast of the Missing
Imponderable Thirst
Psalm (a line-singing of)
Flight Record
At the Top of the Chain
The Bird That Walks on Lily Pads
Earthenware
As at the Far Edge of Circling
A Slim Volume Taken into the Provinces
Empty Sky