"And when he was finished, he scraped fat from the backs of stretched skins, wiped the blood, sewed the seams, bit the thread with teeth and said: Dress yourselves in these. And they said: what is this verb? God shoved his knife into the earth, and said: It's like make believe but for your body. They looked at all the meat still steaming from when it was alive. God said: Eat. And watched while beasts of Eden fed on beasts of Eden."
"The opening line of the poem contributed by Philip Gross, This, in I won't say the heart in the machinery of things seems like a good impressionistic summary of the books's aesthetic, its machinery of things and its heart. I chose O Tuama's poem among the many I admired because one of my current interests is how contemporary and 20th-century poets deal with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity"
Genesis 3:21 is presented as a visceral, graphic scene in which God makes coats of skins: scraping fat, wiping blood, sewing seams, and offering them to Adam and Eve. God drives a knife into the earth, frames the skins as a bodily make-believe, commands them to eat, and watches beasts feed on beasts. The imagery collapses a sanitized Eden into a place of appetite and predation, where clothing and survival emerge from slaughter. The portrayal reads the Old Testament as marked by human brutality and conflict and portrays God as an all-too-human dictator who can also appear vulnerable.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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