Those I Guard: Poems - Hardcover

Kirchwey, Karl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151901708 ISBN 13: 9780151901708

Publisher: Mariner Books, 1993

Synopsis

Kirchwey inspects moments of experience and insight, bringing into careful focus an aquarium, a jewelry display case, a walnut, a childhood classroom, a fire hydrant, a barber shop, an Alpine landscape, seaweed in moonlight. Ancient Greece and the Bible contend with modern street scenes, and history and the passing of generations accompany the present moment. With gentle humor and the seriousness of the timeless, he plumbs sensuous detail for hidden meaning - the more we examine the lines and images that result, the more light they shed.
Those I Guard is a beautiful book and an important contribution to American poetry.

About this title

Reviews

After a few inconsequential poems about growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Kirchwey's speakers join the frivolous jet set, dropping the names of European or Greek towns in titles and subtitles of poems that have no other reference to a foreign landscape. Despite a highly polished surface, this debut collection by the director of the Poetry Center at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y often suggests much ado about nothing. A spider is superficially described as "physicist and acrobat." Words seem straight out of the dictionary--"neuralgic," "tonsorial"--they are not inappropriate, just unnecessarily showy. Rhymes are another superficial stunt not integral to the poems in which they are used. Attempts to link contemporary brutality with Greek mythology appear unintentionally ironic. Thus the news story of an infant thrown into an incinerator recalls Hera dropping her infant son off Mt. Olympus. But the most frustrating aspect of Kirchwey's poems is his tendency to break up sentences with asides, as in these opening lines: "One evening--it will be just before winter's end,/ your neighbor coughing all night in the room below,/ who has aged forty years since December--/ reading about Parian marble, your hearing will quicken. . . . " Readers, drawn in by a poem's lyrical, circuitous mood, reach its end with no awareness of what took place.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151901708
• ISBN 13: 9780151901708
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 89