Small Defeats by Gordon Weaver
Gordon Weaver is known well throughout the world of American letters. Since the publication in 1968 of his first novel, Count a Lonely Cadence (produced as a feature film entitled Cadence), Weaver has gone on to publish seven collections of short fiction and three other novels and to edit or co-edit four critical works. His fiction has won O. Henry and Pushcart awards and appeared in many prestigious anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and Best of the West. Weaver is also a poet of accomplishment, a fact known only by a few editors and by his former students, many of them now successful writers themselves. Though his poems have appeared in numerous well-known journals, such as Southern Review and Colorado Quarterly, he has never released a collection of his poetry. Small Defeats is no small accomplishment. In an age in which anything goes in poetry, Gordon Weaver is a meticulous stylist who is as comfortable with the sestina and sonnet as he is with free-verse. Unlike many of his foggy contemporaries, whose ethereal subject matter leaves readers stumbling in the dark, Weaver writes magically and clearly about remembering his father (in a poem as memorable as Roethke's My Papa's Waltz), visiting his dying Aunt Eva, bathing his daughter, burying a dog. The poems are the testimony of a man who has come to terms with the life he has lived. As he writes in the title poem, My chewed-over past is the sour, dull grist / On which, for scant nourishment, I rely, / I am a man untroubled in his mind, / Certain of whatever death I may find. Small Defeats has been a long time coming. It will prove well worth the wait.
Gordon Weaver is the author of four novels, ten story collections, and a collection of poetry and has published over a hundred stories in numerous major literary journals. His novels include The Eight Corners of the World (1988), Circling Byzantium (1980), Give Him a Stone (1975), and Count a Lonely Cadence (1968), filmed as Cadence starring Martin and Charlie Sheen in 1991. Weaver's short fiction collections include The Entombed Man of Thule (1972), Such Waltzing Was Not Easy (1975), Getting Serious (1980), Morality Play (1985), A World Quite Round (1986), (1991), The Way We Know in Dreams (1995), Four Decades: New & Selected Stories (1997), Long Odds (2000), and Last Stands (2004). Founding Editor of the Mississippi Review, editor of Cimarron Review for many years, Weaver was General Editor of the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction, a series of over sixty book length critical studies in short fiction. He taught at, inter alia, the University of Southern Mississippi, Oklahoma State University for many years as a full professor, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Among other awards, Weaver received first place in the O. Henry Award, inclusion in the Best American Short Stories, two national Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, and a 2002 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781881515180 |
| Title | Small Defeats |
| Author | Gordon Weaver |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Texas Review Press |
| Year published | 1999-02-01 |
| Number of pages | 32 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |