A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough by Patrick Lawler

A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough by Patrick Lawler

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. Patrick Lawler moves into the slender lines of shattered glass, the spaces between lyric and narrative, between metamorphosis and mutation. From the artful surface of a Russian novel, rich with symbolism and white bears, to a survivor's unwillingness to immerse himself in life or leave it, the poems in A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough hunger for a language beyond the solid, for the fragmentation that makes a scene complete.

Brilliance in poetry isn't always to be coveted; sometimes a poet is so blinded by the gorgeous phrase that meaning seems irrelevant—a feeling the reader rarely sharesIn the case of Patrick Lawler, however, verbal brilliance is put in the service of deep philosophic probing: the question is 'how to distinguish / evil from benign absurdity' in a world where the 'dark dream names' of wars are brought to us nightly in 'talking light.' The poet, struck with the loss of moral certainty, finds even language slips away from what it tries to pin down. . . . This fine first book should appeal to readers who share Lawler's concern for the moral and the real.

-- Booklist

PATRICK LAWLER is the director of the Writing Program at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is also the author of the poetry collections Feeding the Fear of the Earth and Reading a Burning Book.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820311586
ISBN 10	0820311588
Title	A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough
Author	Patrick Lawler
Series	The Contemporary Poetry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	1990-01-01
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.