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SearchSTALKS - News & ReviewsMarch 2010 - Reader, It has been a heavy winter lying on the land. March is the beginning of spring, certainly here in California where the coreopsis and the cherry blossoms are abundantly blooming. DIESEL Bestsellers
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Wordplay
Diesel has a passion for language, creative combinations of syllabic style, ornery onomatopoeia, magical metonymy and enchanting enjambment. The following is a simple sample.
Broken World (Paperback)$15.00 ISBN-13: 9781566891981Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Coffee House Press, 04/01/2007 Joseph Lease's Broken World is a lament, a jazz melody, an explanation of how the world (both personal and political) ends. These poems keenly, delicately explore all that is no longer here and never-was-but-should-have-been. Lease's lines are formally austere, using the page and caesura to evoke the space needed for the ideas he presents. These poems exercise a vulnerable, wry negative-awareness that nonetheless accepts us, not in spite of, but rather exactly for everything we lack as individuals and as a nation. "The elegies are taking off their clothes--" (p. 39): indeed they are, and with such abandon. -- Trevor Calvert Chronic: Poems (Hardcover)$20.00 ISBN-13: 9781555975166Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Graywolf Press, 02/01/2009 D.A. Powell's latest collection of poetry, Chronic, possesses equal parts heartbreak and swagger, lust and wit, as he traverses landscapes of unbridled erotica and unparalleled loss. Collaged on these pages we find stories of death and disco, climate change and chronic illness, suburbia and satellites, democracy and one-night-stands. Revealing a wordsmith in his creative prime, Powell's language tends to trigger a powerful visual, sensual and auditory response with every line; even as he writes "sweetmeats and barium ooze from her fistula / cystic hibiscus - with plaster and spatula," the reader's ear delights and her imagination shifts from a candied delicacy to an x-ray image to a blooming flower to a body in disrepair. This crystalline arrangement of shifting and overlapping images is Powell's forte: presenting routine objects, environments and relationships as if seen through a kaleidoscope - at times humorous, at times devastating. With poems this formally and conceptually exquisite, it's hard not to be hooked in an instant, to be drawn to "the parallax of bodies which are and are not ours." -- Steffi Drewes
Why Poetry Matters (Paperback)$14.00 ISBN-13: 9780300151466Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Yale University Press, 04/01/2009 In this deep reading of the poetic enterprise - with chapters from "Defending Poetry" to "Divine Parameters" - Parini shows why poetry matters through revealing how, and of what, poems are made. "Poems are made things...Poetry is conversation." This is a great introduction to, defense of, and deep dive into the poetic world - enlightening, conversational and useful. -- John Evans
In the Pines (Paperback)$18.00 ISBN-13: 9780143112549Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 10/01/2007 Notley has helped guide and challenge contemporary poetics for as long as I've been alive. In the Pines continues with this; it is mythic, of-the-earth. Notley has created a triptych wherein transformation is a constant. Protean and feminine in its narrative, we read of speakers shifting, flickering almost, from state to state, sometimes so fast not even they know what state they inhabit: "I'm turning into something I never foresaw. When I get there I'll recognize it." This collection never settles - it pulses from prose to verse, from concept to something almost tangible. In the Pines stalks, haunts, and sings. -- Trevor Calvert
Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (Hardcover)$45.00 ISBN-13: 9780374105365Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 10/01/2008 My first encounter with David Hinton was a slim volume of poetry entitled The Selected Poems of Li Po. The translations felt fresh and alive and I read and re-read that book many times. For me, it was the language that I kept going back for - or, really, the not-language. Paired with the concise and vivid nature of Chinese poetry, Hinton's use of space and his attention to sound allows the mystery in each image a chance to blossom, and I say a chance because the poems never feel finished, they continue to grow and unfurl with each new read. This newest anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry, is just as wonderful. Hinton includes selections from all the early classics (The Book of Songs, Tao Te Ching, Songs of Ch'u, and a large selection of Tang poetry) but also gives his readers a chance to visit other folk-song collections and versions of poems which I personally had never seen before, including a wonderful series of seasonal poems by Lady Midnight. Aside from beautiful translations, the reader also gets many historical aids, in-depth notes and a large reference for future reading. Any fan of Chinese poetry, history, poetics or poetry in general should take a look at this wonderful collection. It is a beautiful edition and one I will pull from my shelf again and again over the years. -- Sean Mix Rarer and More Wonderful (Paperback)$14.00 ISBN-13: 9780615213989Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Scrambler Books, 08/01/2008 From the Union Herald:
Broken into 4 sections, Rarer's pages move and build on each other forming something of a metaphysics by the book's last lines: "a redefinition of self somehow finally knowing the popular theory that time does not even exist and without it the universe makes sense again[...]like a bee stinging its own back"(69)
The opening section, "Struck Landscape", sets the tableau-lyricism, Foucault, automatons--for the literal "Punch & Judy" that follows it. "Punch", ever the violent sadist, is on a search for meaning[...]
The third section acts like a poetic attempt at a Keirkegaardian Either/Or statement, showing the limitations in various approaches to reality and existence, which of course sets up the eschatological final section, "An Approach to Ending".
$24.00 ISBN-13: 9781555974978Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Graywolf Press, 04/01/2008 William Stafford was a conscientious objector during the second World War. These poems are filled with the compassion and insight Stafford earned during his forced enrollment in the Civilian Public Service program as a result of his ethical views. Written sometimes with a zen-like plainness that was unusual for American poetry at the time, one can see the early development of this wonderful artist. - Sean Mix Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Hardcover)$35.00 ISBN-13: 9780674026957Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days Published: Belknap Press, 11/01/2007 If there are books to read, books to study, and books to live with, then Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form belongs to the latter two categories. It is nothing short of an education and, like all good educations, demands a lot from its student. The primary reason is Yeats himself. He is a brilliant but often difficult poet, reveling in a density of expression and meaning that naturally lends itself to contemplation but can appear inaccessible at first reading. It takes a patient and skillful if not brilliant guide to tease out the intricacies of his profound poetic imagination. And fortunately for us, Helen Vendler is all of these and then some. For it is Yeat's previously overlooked use of form - how he constructs a poem internally through rhythm and meter and externally through stanza shape, line lengths, and use of tradional lyric structures - that is the primary subject and field insight for her work. The result is one revelation after another. - Colin
Actual Air (Paperback)$14.00 ISBN-13: 9781890447045Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Open City Books, 02/01/2000 David Berman -- lead singer and songwriter for The Silver Jews -- writes lilting, funny poems steeped in Americana from the Deep South. His air is thick and humid, a smoky, wry wit. There is dialogue here, too; punchy conversational notes between himself and reader, not marked but inserted casually - archetypes as quirk, sewn together by a narrative thread celebrating life. Exquisite. - Grant
The Poems of Georg Trakl (Paperback)$15.95 ISBN-13: 9780856462856Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Anvil Press, 11/01/2006 Musical imagist, tone poet of strange kinetic beauty, Trakl is a dark dense master of mood and melancholy. His phrases may not make sense, but the will make you feel in ways previously unimagined. Wittgenstein said it best: "I do not understand [Trakl's poems]; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius." Read the words aloud, for they are chewy and delicious! - Grant
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