A Longing Like Despair
A Longing Like Despair

Author: Alan Grob

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780874137521

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A major aim of Grob's study is to show Arnold as poet to be possessed of far greater philosophic depth and subtlety than his critics have usually credited him with by identifying the deep affinities and shared weltanschauung of his poetic vision with the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer, the major European philosopher whose insistence on the cosmic opposition between the world as will and the world as idea provided the most important philosophic alternative in the nineteenth century to the age's otherwise dominant progressive historicism."--Jacket.

Skeleton Coast
Skeleton Coast

Author: Elizabeth Arnold

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780990340799

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Poetry. 'What do I see' when I look into the eyes of another? What kind of exchange takes place when that look is returned? The poems in Elizabeth Arnold's devastating SKELETON COAST investigate the ways we are formed by such encounters--especially, at the core of the collection, by encounters with evil in the face of a person one loves, or has loved, or has wanted to love. These poems alternate between spare, psychological explorations and more expansive descriptions of difficult terrain: the Sahara, Egyptian ruins, and the dry riverbeds of the Skeleton Coast in the title sequence. The goal is to read what is truly there, as if we are all wrecks and deserts, to understand our dislocation from the forces that have made us and the sources that might feed us. What is buried is both violence and clarity, 'like a fault deep in the ground / with its / inexact though statistically measurable need / to relieve stress over time.' The vistas and profundities are Jamesian here, the poems scrupulous in their exploration of ethical weights and balances. Each poem is like a delicately fused mechanism, twisting around both still and moving parts, which the reader tracks silently on the way to inevitable, impeccable detonations.--Jennifer Clarvoe

Made Flesh
Made Flesh

Author: Craig Arnold

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13:

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"Few... could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." --Publishers Weekly, starred review "Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." --Time Out New York "The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."--Magill Book Reviews A girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they've been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world. This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and "the joy of self-forgetting," the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other. Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.

Forever: Poems
Forever: Poems

Author: James Longenbach

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 53

ISBN-13: 0393866548

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In lucid, elegant poems, Forever contemplates love against the pressing question of mortality after a diagnosis of cancer. Praised for a voice with "the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet" (Ilya Kaminsky), James Longenbach explores a life lived with the knowledge of its end in his sixth collection. These luminous, lyrical poems pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we will not? Forever explores the meaning of love, from its discovery in the first poem, "Two People," to its maintenance in the last, "Forever." In between, the volume explores the precariously imminent demise of all that we love—the finite lives of other people, the mortal beauty of Venice—all thrown into urgent relief by the poet’s own cancer diagnosis. Evoking "the vivid dailiness of domestic life…and the specificity and poignance" of memories, "these lyrics are intimately personal, achingly autobiographical" (Langdon Hammer, American Scholar). Forthright, moving, and wry, the poems in Forever look back gratefully—excitedly—on a lifetime of self-making and self-shattering events.