Calendar Home
Previous Reading:
« ANDREW ZAWACKI
Next Reading:
CHRIS FORHAN & REBECCA HOOGS »
|
|
Open Books: Event Archive
March 29, 2005 07:30 PM
JOSHUA COREY & RICHARD GREENFIELD
This evening we welcome two poets with well-received first books. Joshua
Corey's Selah (Barrow Street Press) is a masterful, elegiac collection,
remarkable for the depth of emotion conveyed without authorial manipulation.
His imagery is striking and apt, his language is playful in meaning and
sound. Literary puns abound, but with purpose: "I myself am a bell." And his
music is sometimes as exuberant as Theodore Roethke's: "I found a stone bear
/ starting out from / her sphere-- / he wasn't feared there."
Mr.
Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press)
features intense poetry that seeks to retell a past, a very difficult
childhood. He also confronts the impossibility of that retelling.
"Imagination might have saved me, // but now look how it lacks." The poems
sparkle with image, detail, and emotion, and the difficulty of overcoming
trauma tied to familial love . The end of the poem "Triadic" reads: ". he
sleeps in amphetamine gloss. My father wakes me and carries me into the
front room. I am against the black speaker, the singer cries sticks and
stones, the volume shakes my body on the floor. First there is music. Second
there is music. Third there is music."
|
|
