Open Books: Events
November 05, 2009 07:30 PM
DAVID BIESPIEL
The ninth volume in The Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds and published by the University of Washington Press, is David Biespiel's The Book of Men and Women ($19.95). Dense, musical, with unusual turns of phrase, the lyric poems in this, his third collection, are as intricate and layered as an English hedge, with their share of thorns and blossoms. Biblical, literary, historical, and personal references flow from a voice that can be cool, playful, sardonic, and edgily mournful, a restrained tenderness at times emerging. Though ostensibly a "book of men and women," the work might also be said to be a book of the human, the complicated human -- "[T]he flinty candlelights in the window thin and canter, / Bloom and decay, and without question / Our eyes have opened to blackness and what is left unsaid: / This passage of delight is our sorrow and our bed."
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