Bakken, Christopher Goat Funeral: Poems ISBN 13: 9781931357388

Goat Funeral: Poems - Softcover

9781931357388: Goat Funeral: Poems
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"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." --Richard Howard

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From the Back Cover:
"This is the best second book of poems I've read in a decade. Of course a certain bloom or glamour (or is it transparency?) is off, but the verse is requited by richer (fallen?) harmonies. Contours are Apollonian as in After Greece, but the poet knows now that vision, like flesh, is fleeting, even fled, and his assurance blurs, the amber clouds; hence "those moments / of clarifying emptiness / toward which we must steer, then swerve from." Clearly Bakken has already embarked, with this subsequent (but not subaltern) inspection of his cherished Hellenic adequacies ("So many islands, so much blessed salt, / this feast we could not finish by ourselves"), on an ardent if sometimes arduous odyssey. In poetry of this order--so luminous, yet so willing to be lost: "each switchback leads us deeper in"--peregrination itself will be a march of triumph. No captives." --Richard Howard

"Christopher Bakken is using all kinds of poetic arms to convey a complex, ambivalent vision spun between the joy of an afternoon in Greece and the dying of a cat. This is an admirable, rich collection of poems." --Adam Zagajewski

"Whether writing of the Greek landscape, purgatory, Paul Celan, El Greco, or the late Bill Matthews, Christopher Bakken in sinewy, sculpted lines succeeds in embodying an unknown yet knowable world in all its textures and contours. If poetry is the being there of authentic existence, then the poems of Goat Funeral constitute a double triumph, both aesthetic and ontological. This is work of a very high order by one of our finest younger poets." --B.H. Fairchild

About the Author:
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN's first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.

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  • PublisherSheep Meadow Pr
  • Publication date2006
  • ISBN 10 1931357382
  • ISBN 13 9781931357388
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages61
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