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Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Her seminal album Horses, bearing Robert Mapplethorpe’s renowned photograph, hasbeen hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time. Her books include M Train, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.

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Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.

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Auguries of Innocence

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

I saw you who was myself
slightly stooped whistling mouth
with leather sack and breeches brown
striding the naked countryside

with summer bones long and dry
into the breadth of our glad day
mid afternoon the longer night
as you tread bareheaded bright

I saw you a wraith bemoan
stir the fires of the ancient ones
scarred with sticks pome and haw
as the nectar for their script

I saw you walk the length of fields
far as the finger of Providence
far as the mounds we call hills
ranges cut from the heart of slate

I saw you dip into your sack
scattering seeds where they may
as the woodsman hews his way
through oak ash and variant pines

for writing desks that shall reflect
a sheaf of lines that speak of trees
all sober hopes required within
all drunkenness as sacred swims

I saw the book upon the shelf
I saw you who was myself
I saw the empty sack at last
I saw the branch your shadow cast

Excerpted from Auguries of Innocenceby Patti Smith Copyright © 2008 by Patti Smith. Excerpted by permission.
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