Entire Dilemma: Poems Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Entire Dilemma: Poems Book

Human relationships in all their quotidian brilliance are the focus of this seventh collection by Michael Burkard. While William Wordsworth professed to write his poems in "the common language of man," Burkard actually achieves a linguistic accessibility in his poems without sacrificing lyricism or imagery, as in the title poem: "The blackbird is sewing a song for you / to wear. A heavy song. All the heavier, for it is a song you will / always wear, and wear it upside down." One of Burkard's fascinating traits is his timing. Often his poems are of a well-rounded moment, compounding image and meaning with a sense of soft closure in the final lines. For example, in "Driving Through Her Father with the Desert" he describes the metamorphosis of a woman, "Not painful, / not tearful. / Odd like a light / when you don't need one." In "Sober Ghost," closure illuminates the poem's recursivity when he writes, "There is an alcoholic shine to that darkness. It's enough of a longing / to make me tremble. And then I turn back, as I do here." --Susan SwartwoutRead More

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  • Product Description

    Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkhard's seventh collection of poetry and his first book since W.W. Norton published My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems) in 1990. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and two grants from both the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently the University of Louisville, LeMoyne College, and Syracuse University. During the 1990s, he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism.

    "On rare occasions one comes across an artist whose work feels truly haunted, as mysterious and resonant as the landscape or the constantly shifting reality of our dreams. . . . Michael Burkard's poetry presents a kaleidoscopic and rigorously self-reflective vision, encompassing at once a great tenderness for the world and an uneasiness with the surfaces to which we cling. . . . In a time of far too much
    cleverness and cacophony, Entire Dilemma serves as a touchstone, an indispensable reminder of just how quiet and redemptive poetry can be."-Provincetown Arts

    "Burkard's poems are lit from within, radiant but disturbing. . . . Entire Dilemma exists . . . where complex hope, via poetic creation, defeats simple spiritual estrangement."-The Gettysburg Review

    "Burkard's new book stands as an antidote to the fashionable but spiritually unambitious work that passes for publishable poetry now flooding the literary marketplace. Burkard returns us to a primary strangeness. . . . [He] is invested in a metaphysics of relationship, probing into how we treat each other (and hence ourselves). . . . His is an honest introspection mapping out hearts that ever slide."-Harvard Review

    "Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkard's first book since 1990's My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems), and it is, in my mind, the most coherent of his collections. . . . The earlier work sings to and from what could be called 'American surrealism' (Williams and Stevens, Tate and Knott), with strains of Kafka, Babel, and Borges providing th

  • 1889330183
  • 9781889330181
  • Michael Burkard
  • 1 September 1998
  • Sarabande Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 88
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