Sills gathers together poems from four of O’Brien’s early books and combines them with later work, forming a selection from 1960-1999. O'Brien writes, “The poems dance their dance of stillness and motion. The issue is a quiet, patterned music, animated, disciplined, ecstatic; not closure, but recognition.”This new edition provides the reader with the best introduction to O’Brien’s work, a poet hailed as a modern master of the lyric form and a poet of genuine significance in the American canon.
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Sills gathers together poems from four of O’Brien’s early books and combines them with later work, forming a selection from 1960-1999. O'Brien writes, “The poems dance their dance of stillness and motion. The issue is a quiet, patterned music, animated, disciplined, ecstatic; not closure, but recognition.”
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The FallsThe RoomSummerDuring SicknessPersephoneSundayWindowWaking“the child’s secret, who you sit down next to”“from mayday to solstice, parades”SkinCrossingAnother SundayPostcardJean ArpDeathmask: HeineSwan“I come out, see my shadow, go back to sleep”For Ruth“Eurydice, forget me not”“nullity is cinelinear, the calliopes of surrealism”Half MoonThe NoteEarly MarchRimbaudBrooklyn“reason & evening: a phonebooth”“a cage of need, a dream”“between babytalk & ‘the Odyssey of Geist’”“A dream of reason calm as a garden”“Ophelia’s ghost, like an unimproved road”After a Cadence of Hart CraneIn FeverJackstrawsPerceptual Difficultiessong & imageMarcel DuchampFour ChorusesThe DaysPostcards from NambeEast BranchThree California PoemsFinistere“The song the torso sings”SundownCassisThe PassengerThe Days, AgainEarring“The split seed-pods of the grass”“Monk had his Baroness like Rilke”“The world and its likeness”Four Places“the dandy you pass in the intersection”The TermsThe LoomIn the ElevatorDamageRadioEchocardiogramLives of the SaintsA TranslationChambers StreetAmuletAngelsMemoryFrom an AnthologyFormals & Bridals4 SongsRainStonesRubricAchill IslandWinterAt Schoodic14 SongsA Pillow-BookThe InstructionsArthur DoveIn Memory of Frank KuenstlerFor Iso & SusanTrains Going ByLate AugustApplecrossA QuarryStations“Horses standing in rain”
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Memory finally connects everything with everything, as if the world were an immense pun: a broadside, against the grain, every synapse firing. O’Brien records this pun with a verve and zeal that is both remarkably fresh and reliably consistent. His wit and speed are ready vehicles for a quite frequently skeptical engagement with the world around him. We should feel lucky to have these poems gathered under one roof.
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No other poet now writing is more alert from word to word or registers the world with Michael O’Brien’s oblique precision. Sills is a large event: our first comprehensive look at a neglected American master.
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No other poet now writing is more alert from word to word or registers the world with Michael O'Brien's oblique precision. Sills is a large event: our first comprehensive look at a neglected American master. -- August Kleinzahler In a way that few contemporary books of poetry can claim to be, Sills is an authentic companion to living, in the midst of radios, waiting rooms, ferryboats, eyelids, fine rain, and everything else to which this poetry is constantly awake. -- Geoffrey O'Brien Some writers expand, others contract. Over the years O'Brien has pared his poetry to essentials. He shapes this matter in many forms, and the resulting music is declarative, terse, and elegant. No ornament blurs the reader's intense pleasure. -- William Corbett Sills, perches, diacritical perspectives on a late world as seen from its very edge: the poetry of Michael O'Brien teeters between the given and the intuited, the perceived and the proposed. As with all significant creative works, his is born of an inherent contradiction. What O'Brien's eye catches in its relentless observation of an exhausted age ("the rain washing the world away"), his ear, his wonderfully keen lyric acuity, as if refutes, offers up an alternative of its own. ("A vowel/to ride on" or later, "Little bones of/the ear, house built/of air.") Speech, in these beautifully executed poems,comes to the rescue of substance. "To live high, up among the cornices, from exception to exception, hearing an earthly music" is, ultimately, what Sills is about. -- Gustaf Sobin
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Half Moonthe crazy sunall our lives singular(rhymes like shadows)the day’s heavethe steep bellson the way to everywhere else“human language is humiliation & madness”on 9th St. a secret rainthe mumbled buildingswit like hockeythese obstaclesa tourniquet of smokecharmthe ghost of a form“senseless as nature”a postcarda checkdown the riverevery candle a commodity& drunken valentineo shepherdthe homage is the massacrethe printing-press, the floating loan& compost, memoirturns, a leaf at a timeA Journey to the North Countryfour-legged haiku, cranes, a day& a day, fabulous twin citiesthe chancesambition’s crapgame will never abolishreader, any book, any October
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781844715626
Publisert
2009
Utgiver
Vendor
Salt Publishing
Høyde
216 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Dybde
9 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
148

Forfatter

Biographical note

Michael O’Brien was born in Granville, NY in 1939; studied at Fordham, the University of Paris, and Columbia; worked as a librarian; was one of the Eventorium poets, where his first book was published in 1967; taught at Brooklyn and Hunter; worked for many years editing technical publications; wrote The Summer Poems, Conversations at the West End, Blue Springs, Veil, Hard Rain, The Ruin, The Floor and the Breath, 17 Songs, At Schoodic, Sills, Six Poems, Swift Moons Repair Celestial Losses, and Sleeping and Waking. He lived in New York and died in November 2016.