Full Description
David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."
The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.
Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.
Contents
Preface
Pagan
Hallucination
Under a Blossoming Plum Tree
French Kiss
Poets
Dear Justice
Explication de Texte
Faith
Gentrification
After the Wedding
Drunks
Shoulders
Brawls
Sangria
Xerxes
Prayer
Starlings
Exile
Godhood
Ferdinand Magellan
Parties
Spiritual Guy
Brusque
Ars Poetica
Kazoo
Civilization in the Next War
Home
Amichai 1924-2000
Hermes
Acknowledgments
About the Poet
