Product Description

The first winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, this collection reminds readers that poems can be as tangible, as substantial, as redemptive as those things the poet will not let go unspoken in the world. The author's compassionate witness is born out of immersion in bittersweet particulars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3981182 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 85 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In Clewell's (Blessings in Disguise) sixth book, poems are built from conjectures about the world. His method is akin to talking out loud; he invents stories like the ones we may have used to avoid a scolding in grade school or to impress a first date. Unfortunately, when he writes his riffs on these subjects, Clewell's voice can't keep from telling us that "we might feel" and he "must have meant" and "we have to feel." If the poems' meanings are over-determined in this way, it's because Clewell seems to guess about things his feelings alone can't fathom. His imaginings, then, have little of the texture of life observed firsthand. Clewell's love poems, though, are successful, delivering an intimacy that elsewhere may escape him. There is good writing here, and strong prose segments in a 21-page poem. The book as a whole, though, risks too much with its off-beat subjects, and Clewell ventures an off-handed virtuosity that is difficult to pull off.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Wishful Thinking
I wish you would buy this book. You need this book. Everyone you know needs a copy of this book. The holidays are coming up. Birthdays, Anniversaries, Mondays. All good reasons to get this book and give it to someone you care about. Your life will be better for it--his or her life will be better for it--I promise. It's all about seeing the world clearly and loving it anyway, or rather, because.

Clewell arrives
This volume marks Clewell's arrival in the realm of poetry that contributes something substantial to literature. It's not as inspired on the whole as _The Conspiracy Quartet_, which is his best book to date, but it contains some of his best individual poems.