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The Wichita Poems
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In the Black Window
The title of Michael Van Walleghen's new collection evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed him throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, In the Black Window more generally points to Van Walleghen's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience--those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves. We live at once in a strictly personal, material dimension but also in a distinctly spiritual one. Yet, when looking from a lighted kitchen into a night-black window on a winter evening, we might perhaps become suddenly aware not only of our own reflection, but also of our complicity in some deeper mystery altogether.
New American Poets
The best contemporary American poets are represented in this essential anthology.
Tall Birds Stalking
This is the fourth collection by the Lamont Award winner Michael Van Walleghen. The title poem, about the death of the poet's father, sets the tone for the book. In poem after poem the experience of loss gives way to something paradoxically approaching its opposite, that lifting of the spirit we feel in the presence of exuberant formal invention, in the luminous order of metaphor and metaphysical insight.
Rhythm & Booze
Arranged in four parts--each associated with a particular Louisiana city--the poems in Rhythm & Booze trace the hardships and uncertainties, as well as the moments of unexpected sublimity, of a life lived in a continuous struggle between fresh starts and destructive old patterns. Mirroring the music of New Orleans, Kane's poems combine traditional form with improvisational flourishes. Rhythm & Booze charts her progress as she undertakes a number of journeys, from youth to experience, from blues bars to college classrooms, from city to country, from chaos to something approaching peace.
Renunciation
Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air." The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.
Poems from the Sangamon
"Regional poetry at its best, where the strongly articulated local voice slips easily, persuasively, and movingly into the universal." -- J. R. Willingham, Choice "Uses the history and prehistory of the Sangamon river valley as his subject matter; the poems are laconic, earthy, full of sharply observed details, and are rendered with a flair for common speech." -- Library Journal "Knoepfle has long been misunderstood and underestimated among U.S. poets. . . . poems from the sangamon, his finest single collection to date, celebrates the Sangamon country around Springfield." -- Charles Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Captures without nostalgia a time and a people in their essences, embodying their raw emotions, their dreams, and the bitter realities of being caught up in the twentieth century." -- Anne C. Bromley, Prairie Schooner
Nine Skies
Selected by Sandra McPherson for the 1996 National Poetry Series The late poet James V. Dickey was judge of the Yale Prize poetry competition when he wrote to A. V. Christie, one of the finalists, "I have become very fond of your poems, especially the elegiac ones. . . . Your work is heartfe believes every word of it. . . . You have given me much in-depth pleasure; have moved me strongly." The work in Nine Skies is as Dickey described it--heartfelt, moving. Here is what others say about it: "Beautifully crafted and sustained, with six or seven poems as fine as anything being written today. This remarkable book is a rite of passage for the poet and speaks of even better things to come." -- El...
Creole Echoes
"Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of highly accomplished verses. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets, presented by M. Lynn Weiss in their original French alongside new English translations by Norman R. Shapiro.The poems gathered here were all composed in French by Louisiana residents of European, African, and Caribbean origin. Their themes range from love and history to nightmare and childhood recollection. In these pages somber elegies meet whimsical surprises, and rhyming animal fables meet political panegyrics. "
