The Face: A Novella in Verse - Hardcover

St. John, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060593660 ISBN 13: 9780060593667

Publisher: Harper, 2004

Synopsis

David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse.

The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John's poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope -- meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.

Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell's Life Studies and John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.

About this title

About the Author

David St. John is the author of eleven collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for the National Book Award in poetry) as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews titled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is University Professor and chair of the English Department at the University of Southern California, and lives in Venice Beach, California.

Reviews

St. John's ninth collection is roughly plotted around a midlife crisis: "Each day, in the mirror, that face smeared a bit more brutally/ Across the glass." In order to push the narcissism to its limits, St. John confronts his speaker with a forthcoming biopic of his own life, complete with poor scripting by an ex-, "Infanta," and a young cinematographer "with a pierced dick." Fuguing around writing process-oriented repetitions of "assembling" and "dissembling," the speaker utters an Eliotic cri de coeur ("I have invented a whole philosophy of shatterings"), complains about the script ("That tapestry of travesty") and alternately fantasizes about and feels revulsion for the "hot" young woman cast to play him, with "a certain angel-butch Joan-of-Arcish kind of thing." September 11, as a key recent event in the speaker's life, is presented as a set piece with "flakes of flint falling/ Through long fingers of flame. Black leaves. Feuilles de noire." Faulty cell phone communication, straight talk on cultural decline ("remind us why anyone gives a shit, OK?") and a lengthy diversionary prose poem listing varieties of masks follow, until, at the premiere of the movie of his life, the speaker "hurls," crawls outside and sees a vision of his own face assemble in the sky. Despite some entertainingly arch moments (on literary couples: "all that flesh made word") and anecdotes of self-abnegation, most readers will have put it together and walked out long before that.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060593660
• ISBN 13: 9780060593667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80