Desire: Selected Poems 1963-1987 - Hardcover

Bromige, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087685725X ISBN 13: 9780876857250

Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr, 1988

About this title

Review:

3 Ways With The Same Sentence
4 Pieces For 4 Voices Interrupting 1 For None
5 Poems (sea To Witness)
Able To Describe The Verses
Absolute Assertion #334
Abstract
The Accident
Affair Of The Lemming
After Brecht
After The Engraving
All That Remains Of A Poem By Helmut Maria Solk
Another Voice
The Arbitrators
Art Of Capitalism (somewhat Later)
Art Of Capitalism (somewhat Later)
As I Asked
As Now
Ascribing A Motive
At Last
Back To A's Place
Because
Beyond The Constellations Here & Now
A Blessing
Blue, Red, Yellow
Born Again
Broadside
But As For Art
By Night
By Visible Truth We Mean The Apprehension Of The Absolute
A Call
Calm As The Night
The Cause
A Choice Piece
Choosing The Event
Continuous
Counted Blessings
Credences Of Winter
Credo
The Crux
The Death Of Poetry
A Defect
A Definition
Desire
Dictation
Doggone Real
Down In The Dance
An End
The End Of The Stranger
An Esthetic
Eternal Image
Even Now
An Excrescence
A Final Mission
Finally
First
For Christopher Bromige
For San Antonio Estero
Free & In Love
Fresh From Sleep
The Future Is Our Mother
Gifts
Hieratics: A Triptych
A High Mass
His Story
I Can't Read & Here's A Book
I Dreamt That I
I Know
I Read This Someplace
If Wants To Be The Same
The Imagist Seizes His Opportunity
In An Orchard, In America, In August
In His Image
In Time
It's The Same Only Different %the Melancholy Owed Catagorie
Just Think
Lawrence's Irritations
Laying The Word
Log
Logical Conclusions
The Logical Positivist
Love Was Once A Little Boy
Love's Way
Love-poet
Made
Me Too
The Meaning Alters
More
More Some %dicta Of William Blake
My Failing
My Fault
My Mother Died Of Emphysema
A Mystery
A Nest
Next Love
Not Guilty
The Object
The Objectionable
Objectively
Old Fashioned Poem About God
On A Photograph From Childhood: Of My Mother, My Sister ...
Opening A Trap
Our Frequencies
Outside
Ownership
Person
Please, Like Me
Poem
The Point
Prayer
Precept
Present Correct
A Project
The Quest
The Realist Surrenders Her Secret
Recognized
Revolving Door
The Romance Of The Automobile
Rumor
A Secret
Seeing That You Asked
A Shadow
Sitting Across From The Mother
A Slot
Snarling Traffic
So
So The Darkness
Sonnet
Soul Mates
A Spell
Still There
Taking Heart
Tall Portrait (2 Or 3 Storeys) Of M.p. As D.b
The Terms
They Are Eyes
Tight Corners
Title Deferred
To A Pure Content
To The Limit
Typicality Enthralls With Its Particular Failures
Under Flourescent Lights
Watchers Of The Skies
We've Seen The Expression Of Those People
Weight Less Than The Shadow
What
What Counts
What Friends
Why I Went There
Wisdom Knows
With Someone Like You
Y (an Imaginary Letter)
Zeno's Present
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From Publishers Weekly:

The poems in this collection, winner of the 1988 Western States Book Award, are noticeably spontaneous. While this device occasionally works in the poet's favor (" . . . a call girl/maybe, or beloved hurrying to her lover/a beginning? Or quite indifferent to/ his wounded maleness, his or anybody/ else's! the glass-&-wood wedge thrusts him/ into the street, on his shoulder/ the weight & force of those strange thighs."), more often it becomes self-indulgent musing, without shape or clarity: "There is only the kiss,/ your first, so absolute/ who would move on from it?/ Everything that follows/ only means to be what it meant,/ all you could tell it led to." Bromige ( Threads , etc.) is an observer of life's absurdities and ironies, and attempts here to tell about all he's seen. The result reads like an unedited journal that is too personal to be accessible or interesting. The poems, though divided into six titled sections, often overlap thematically, and many are indistinguishable. Bromige writes lyrics, as well as straight prose and word-play gimmicks, sacrificing consistency of rhythm and language for variety. A few provocative verses are overshadowed by many others that are banal, self-conscious and sentimental: "As I asked/ What is going to become/ of us, one fact/ escaped me, you/ were listening for me/ to complete a meaning,/ and looking at me/ was the fact I overlooked,/ looking at you."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 087685725X
• ISBN 13: 9780876857250
• Binding: Hardcover