Stones are the First to Rise

In Stones Are the First to Rise, Buddha, a U.P.S. driver, and an old woman living in hill country shares space and time with stones and peas and war and climate change, plus explorations of childhood and becoming a particular person. Throughout many of his books, Giannini finds himself working with discrete sets of concerns over the course of months or years, concerns that nevertheless cohere as a single envisioning, a book, as the parts of the body cohere to make body. Antonio Porchia's well-known words are appropriate here: "I know what I have given you. I don't know what you have received." The book is now in your hands.SAMPLE POEM: Stones Are the First to Rise The stones talk to each other, just as we do. . . .- Katsumahtauta (U.S. West Coast tribal elder) to anthropologist-linguist Jaime de Angulo1.Rain pushing the night downthrough melting snow, entering earth and we felt safe enough after the storm. We stayed in the ground.Night could then be turned overin the morning. . .the dark clodsand puddles with clouds we didn't crush.Night was coming up through the soiland vanishing. Among our kind, that same small stone turning up, as it did every year, always rising before us, blind eyein the night of dirt. Filthywith what it couldn't see, as a child without a mirror can't seeits smeared face. Nothing Romanticor playful. Nothing green. Ancient.It seemed without knowledgeof what or why it was, surfacingwet and splotchy, a single syllable: stone.2. -in late springA man began tellingthe crushed stonesin the truck-bedeach had the right to remainsilent. Not one listened.Then they were liftedhigher and higher, dumpedloudly into their gray language, their heaped syntax(no one could decipher)on the ground. 'One rakedeserves another, ' said a worker, as she and co-worker beganspreading sentences of graniteuntil the whole story became clear: the fresh path we could walklistening to the small nouns, the ancient ones, turning under our feet, how they depend, as we all do, on boundaries, boulders at the edge.