Tipping Point

Winner of the 1993 Washington Prize

20^th Anniversary Second Edition

As a demolition expert handles explosives, this book carefully explores a continuum of violence from domestic strife to the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. These poems dramatize the spiritual and artistic dilemmas created by the traumas of our time. Second edition with an extensive preface by Nick Flynn.

In the spirit of Wilfred Owen, TIPPING POINT is a book seared by personal and historical fact. Many artists are eager to assume the mantle of ‘witness,’ as if will or ambition could do the work of experience and imagination. In contrast, the gravity, modesty, and moral questioning in Marchant’s poems reveal a mind committed to a version of history that is resolutely human scale. —Tom Sleigh

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from  Tipping Point

—Okinawa, 1970

The commanding general said,

“Every man has a tipping point,

a place where his principles give way.”

 

I told him I did not belong

to any nation on earth, but

a chill shift of wind, its hint of squall

 

beyond the mountain tells me

no matter what I said or how,

it will be a long swim back,

my complicities in tow.

 

 

Read complete poem

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Cover Art: “Profile,” etching/print by Nona Hershey, done in 1986.

The image consists of electric wires and their shadows on the wall of a house. To my eye, the shadows and wires combine to form a wonderfully dynamic and “pointed” abstract image.

Nona Hershey’s work is included in public and corporate collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Library of Congress; Fogg Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; Crakow National Museum; and the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome. She has participated in over 100 Print Biennials and Group Exhibitions internationally. Nona Hershey is currently Professor and Coordinator of the Printmaking Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

To learn more about Nona Hershey’s work, consult the Schoolhouse Gallery website.