The Cartographer's Melancholy: Poems - Softcover

Axelrod, David

4.33

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780899241609: The Cartographer's Melancholy: Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0899241603 ISBN 13: 9780899241609

Publisher: Lynx House Press, 2018

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Fate, stillness, travel, will, and the deep bruise of individual history as it becomes political history all shape David Axelrod's classic book, originally published in 2005. In a language extraordinarily lean and fresh, Axelrod shows what it would be like to be truly alive to the nuance of events, structures, and the declarations of those who are in or out of power. This is an unusual and moving book.

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About the Author:

David Axelrod has published eight collections of poems and a collection of non-fiction, Troubled Intimacies. He teaches at Eastern Oregon University, where he directs the Ars Poetica Lecture Series and edits―along with Jodi Varon―the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts.

Review:

"'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and makeit a soul?' Keats asked in a letter to his family. David Axelrod in The Cartographer's Melancholy mapsthat pilgrimage. He follows the refugee road with its transcendence, resignation, and dark dramatichistories, and within each poem he makes the important discoveries, the ones that counterpoise suf-fering against the world's beauty."―Sandra Alcosser

"Like exposures at an archeological dig, 'holy site piled upon / wreckage of holy site,' history presentsus simultaneously with both the miraculous and the annihilated. Many poets would leave us here, definedby our ethical absence, our greatest failures. Instead, Axelrod points us toward the power of individualgesture: of walking in old forest, of giving and receiving, of gathering together. Fearless, his poems enter the dark soul of American Empire and come back speaking the language of light."―Richard Robbins

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