Minding the Sun - Softcover

Pack, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226644081 ISBN 13: 9780226644080

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

With characteristic sensitivity and intelligence, Robert Pack reflects on man's relation to and responsibilities toward nature. Throughout, his verses are informed with an ecological vigilance born of his devotion to the New England landscape.

The opening section marks a return for Pack to the musical sensuality of the lyric. These short lyrics are uniquely his: the sequence begins in Vermont and concludes in the Andromeda galaxy, providing an opportunity to hold in mind the nurturing sun of our solar system.

The poems of the collection's middle section, written in the flowing narrative and meditative mode familiar to Pack's many admirers, take up the themes of human sexuality and consciousness. And the final section, replete with puns and paradoxes, shows Pack at his most playful as he muses on art, technology, romantic and marital desire, and the stubborn longing for transcendence. The poet concludes the volume with a sobering plea, "The Trees Will Die," to heed the sun's example, to cherish and protect our planet and all its living things.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Pack is the Abernethy Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Emeritus at Middlebury College and Distinguished Senior Professor Emeritus of Humanities in the Honors College of the University of Montana, Missoula. He is the author of five prose works and nineteen previous books of poems, most recently Laughter before Sleep, also available from the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

Ecological tang rather than primordial soup characterizes Pack's latest offerings (after Inheritance and Fathering the Map), which fall into two distinct camps: poems that illustrate his love for nature (including the far reaches of the cosmos) and poems in which nature functions as the soul's field glass. Part One's 15-line lyrics are mainly mellow reveries on human loss, launched from "The Place" which suggests the poet's own Vermont back yard ("Here is the place-the house half hidden in dense pines") and winding up with meditations on outer space. These are mostly poems about loss-of love, of energy, of will. In the next two sections, Pack draws away from an absence "so palpable that I/ can taste it like ripe fruit upon my lips" and starts having fun. His mischievous verses sometimes read like John Donne if Donne's Sierra Club membership dues were paid up. He handily draws ageless themes from subjects such as estrus, cockroaches and the Drake Equation, which estimates how many intelligent civilizations exist in the galaxy. While the whimsy yields occasional obscurantism and his reach becomes a stretch (the voice in "Lament of the Male Gamete" whines, "I feel unprecedented pain/ in being cheated of the chance/ to make myself into a multitude"), the poems here are generally intelligent, deft and provocative.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Here is the place?the house half hidden in dense pines, the hill's slope rambling to the stream, the swamp of jewelweed, the wild grape vines, the vista of a valley like a red hawk's dream of floating steady on the wind ablaze with orange light." Pack (Fathering the Map, Univ. of Chicago, 1993) is at his best in well-honed lyrics, tight, formal sparks that illuminate and identify his place?our place?in nature. As William Stafford suggests of all poets, Pack sees things differently, perhaps from the corner of his eye. In these shorter pieces, he asks no difficult questions but simply tries to locate himself, to find his place in the tableau. Pack is no one-trick pony, though. Longer poems, narratives, and meditations complement the short songs. These, too, are about finding a place, a role, but in a grander scheme of things. Reflecting on the Big Bang theory and chance, the poet is distracted by the brilliant daylight's "reflections on your hair as you, composed within the window frame, stand staring at a hummingbird." There are worlds beyond those we label "natural," and Pack goes a long way toward mapping them. For all larger poetry collections.?Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226644081
• ISBN 13: 9780226644080
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 108