{"title":"The Contemporary Poetry","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"dare-say-book-tod-marshall-9780820350530","title":"Dare Say","description":"\u003cp\u003eEschewing irony for direct statement, the poems in Tod Marshall's first collection imagistically, musically, and passionately articulate a faith in human transcendence. From the mud of our formation (Choir) to the dust of our dying (After Kandinsky), Marshall's poems lyrically obsess over how the broken and violated can envision and speak a heaven of which we know. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThree long poems that shape the book are formative in this process. From the structured order of Bach's Goldberg Variations looming behind the opening poem, Eclipse, to the clash of pagan beauty and traditional religiosity in Botticelli, to the Modernist meditation on form in After Kandinsky, the poems return again and again to the idea of anagogical presence and how it can be best rendered in art to inspire a celebratory ethos of living. Are the violent and shocking events those that best slap us awake? Or are the gentle, lyrical moments the times when we are most keenly aware of the song that is Being? In After Kandinsky, Marshall writes, like syntax \/ a poem that fixes the body \/ to a specific place \/ of points and lines and planes \/ and yet moves to celestial music \/ a poem that tests \/ on fifteenth century truth \/ 'Whoever loves much does much' \/ a poem that glistens with an unmatched insistence \/ a poem that arrives on time \/ and demands everyone \/ nail it to the wall. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHere is a declaration that one could nail manifesto-like to the wall as a pronouncement of the need to see, to hear, and to speak of divinity in the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363453866257,"sku":"CIN0820350532G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52587865473297,"sku":"NLS9780820350530","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740337107217,"sku":"NIN9780820350530","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820350532.jpg?v=1750745842"},{"product_id":"they-are-sleeping-book-joanna-klink-9780820322759","title":"They Are Sleeping","description":"In They Are Sleeping, Joanna Klink tests the limits of solitude, setting her poems in places where our grip on “self” is loosened and blurred—caves, coastlines, rooms in cities. 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Patrick Lawler moves into the slender lines of shattered glass, the spaces between lyric and narrative, between metamorphosis and mutation. 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It is the reservoir, artificial but functional, beautiful only incidentally, that, \"placid through the seasons, may save us.\" The union of narrative (function) and lyricism (beauty) in the reservoir, both reserving and reserved, results in poems that have much to tell, and even more to hold in, leaving the reader with the impression of secrets partly revealed, partly kept in reserve as mercurial lifeblood.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51461182980369,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51461183963409,"sku":"CIN0820324639VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820324639.jpg?v=1751011525"},{"product_id":"harming-others-book-casey-finch-9780820332680","title":"Harming Others","description":"Sweeping across the grave of an ancient empire, settling in among the manikins of Madison Avenue, singing for salvation from an earthly fire, Casey Finch's poems wrestle with the political, personal, and religious questions of our age.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52124993323281,"sku":"NLS9780820332680","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53035337089297,"sku":"NIN9780820332680","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820332680.jpg?v=1757461032"},{"product_id":"drowning-man-is-never-tall-enough-book-patrick-lawler-9780820352268","title":"A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough","description":"This is a poetry of excursions: into maps of lost territories, into the thoughts of a man with no legs, into the life of a town marked by disasters.  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Inspired by depth psychology, the field of psychology devoted to the unconscious, Peter O'Leary's poems work to discover the religious knowledge of the unconscious mind. While seeking a revelatory poetry, O'Leary engages the inconclusive quality of the revealed, observing that \"There's \/ a liquidy trickiness to life, an entropy \/ of spillage.\" The religious imagination that evolves in this series of thirty-four poems is unclouded by dogma and richly colored by erudition, while it tests the limits of human language and experience in an effort to understand our inwardness. Overflowing with images of birds and other objects of day-to-day experience, interwoven with the mythic, allegorical, and biblical, Depth Theology charts a path to understanding our innermost worlds. From \"Lux Contemplatio\": \"there is no place anymore for us to migrate. The need \/ yet remains. \/ Antarctica means now an interior domain. Curiosity \/ about our inner life increases. 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Terese Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration—an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies.  All Aberration received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, a lead in Contemporary Poetry 1986 and a Notable Book nomination by the American Library Association. It was written during stays at Yaddo, MacDowell and Ossabaw, and received the benefit of a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1982. 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In contrast “Ptolemy’s Rules for High School Reunions” explores what happens when you do without a pact with the devil. The gods—Greek and otherwise—also make appearances as a TV announcer in “Philomela,” in the basement with the plumber in “The Smell of Burning Pennies,” and in the dyslexic confusion between “Dog\/God.” But it is not only the divine that charges the poems in Mere Mortals—sex also suffuses and reinvents key relationships. Readers of such wittily probing poems as “The Root of Father is Fat” and “Brassiere: Prison or Showcase?” will know why Philip Levine has described Svoboda as “one light-year from being the polite, loverly, workshop poet. 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