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In The Piano Tuner, Peter Meinke writes of the foreignness that awaits us when we go abroad and when we answer our own front door to admit a stranger, that confronts us in unfamiliar cities and villages and in the equally disquieting surroundings of our memories and regrets. Often in these stories, what seems a safe, comfortable environment turns suddenly threatening. In the title story, a writer's quiet existence amid his antiques and books is dismantled, piece by piece, by a demonic, beer-bellied piano tuner. In "The Ponoes," a man recalls how, as a young boy living in Brooklyn during World War II, he became a collaborationist in the brutal pranks of two Irish bullies. In "The Twisted Rive...
Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.
In Lucky Bones, Peter Meinke moves fluidly through free and formal shapes, taking the reader on a tour through America in the 21st century: family, politics, love, war and peace, old age and death are looked at in ways that are surprising, clear, and warm-hearted. Lit by flashes of anger and laughter as he surveys his territory from the vantage point of old age, the poems are, in the end, both sane and profound, set to Meinke's own music. Consisting of over sixty new poems, the book begins with a house-shaped poem about a family in a beloved old home, and then moves out into the world with poems about a fire-bug, drive-by shootings, and the often violent human condition before circling back to the home and a final epitaph. A clear-eyed feeling of loss permeates Lucky Bones, but not despair: in the midst of conflict, Meinke's world is full of wonder, and wonderful people.
This study analyzes contemporary American sports poetry, demonstrating that poems about sports express common attitudes and showing what the respective sports' poems say about American culture of the last fifty years. While placing particular emphasis on the hero in American sports poetry, the study proves that a considerable body of sports poetry exists in American culture and that it is worthy of serious analysis. The study opens with the analysis done so far on sports poetry, articulates methods of approach, and gives a brief history of sports poetry, beginning with victory chants around the tribal campfire. From Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" to Gibb's "Listening to the Ballgame," the body of the work is organized thematically by sport: baseball, football, basketball, women's sports, and minor sports such as golf, racquet sports, and boxing. The study concludes with a chapter on poems about fans and spectators and a summary of the study's arguments. Each section gives detailed readings of many poems.
Peter Meinke writes with the wisdom of a prophet. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well. In this, his eleventh collection, he is in his element, writing poems of humor and sadness, taking readers to a place they had only a vague hope of ever reaching.
Introduces the inhabitants and visitors of a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the Pacific Ocean and relates their experiences.
A paradigm of actuality -- Searching for the real and actual -- Stirrings and roots: urban sketches and America's flaneur -- The storytellers -- Picturing the present -- Carving out the real -- Experiments in reality -- Documenting time and place.
The poems in The Name for the God Who Speaks reference Caribbean deities, the power of weather and landscape and ancient myths to illuminate an annus horribilis of cancer and loss. In the last poems, youth and music redeem the experience. This is the Name for the God who Speaks Father, you would know these primal prayers, light flashing in the west behind live oaks, a sky-slashed language dead after Conquest. From that living world, we share only lightning, an old god speaking light out of darkness, a chant of rain as alphabet where water flowing is a word.