The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive"
(Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry Almanac
is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and
mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while
the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest,
particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois
dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything
but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out
to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the
destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections
between people and the land. This collection also reflects on a long
poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac
is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet,
especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is
vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has
attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on
[his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and
disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice
in American poetry. From Almanac: THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM
Austin Smith Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town Picassos and
Van Goghs and photographs of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks
or the molds of busts donated by the Art Institute of Chicago to this
dying town's little museum, there was a mummy, a real mummy, laid out
in a dim-lit room by himself. I used to go to the museum just to visit
him, a pharaoh who, expecting an afterlife of beautiful virgins and
infinite food and all the riches and jewels he'd enjoyed in earthly
life, must have wondered how the hell he'd ended up in Freeport,
Illinois. And I used to go alone into that room and stand beside his
sarcophagus and say, "My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400848034
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter