Earthling: Poems
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.47 (590 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393353435 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 80 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
This is a human voice that has come to the middle of life’s desert to find that “In the middle of the desert / you might be anyone.” Longenbach finds here the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet: his voice in this book becomes any earthling’s voice. How does he do it? How does he give clarity to the human in us? In another century people used to call this effect visionary work: the poetry of a true mystic.” - Ilya Kaminsky“James Longenbach knows as much about how poems work as anyone in the world, but he hides this knowledge behind poems that feel so real and artless they hardly seem composed at all. His ‘Allegory’ is the finest instance of transcendence in American writing since Ammons’s
He teaches at the University of Rochester and lives in New York. James Longenbach is the author of four previous volumes of poetry and six volumes of literary criticism, and his work is often featured in The New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.FROM “PASTORAL”Every morning people do exactly what I do.They make their beds, they practice their lutes.Then why am I so afraid?. Earthling confronts our deepest fears in clear and haunting language, from “a poet of extraordinary gifts” (American Academy of Arts and Letters).“Earthling” is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth