Meditations on Rising and Falling: Meditations on Rising and Falling (Wisconsin Poetry Series) - Softcover

Pardi, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299227340 ISBN 13: 9780299227340

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Synopsis

Winner of the 2008 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by David St. John

From tumult to catharsis, the poems in Philip Pardi’s first collection, Meditations on Rising and Falling, explore the emotional tug-of-war that is the human experience. Present at every turn are people searching for meaning and sense in an elusive world: a doorman who plans to punch the senator who never speaks to him, a son who discusses ornithology with his father’s dying friend, a roofer who copes with his past as he senses his imminent fall to the ground. While the poems are witness to the turmoil of both body and soul, they are not without hope. Pardi finds grace in noise, and happiness in the mourning doves, showing us that often, the reasons for disbelief become precisely the reasons for belief. Pardi’s collection is a testimony to faith and resistance in a world where “falling is the given.”

 

Winner, Award for Poetry and Literary Criticism, The Writers’ League of Texas

 

Finalist, 2008 Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America

About this title

About the Author

Philip Pardi has published poems in Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been reprinted in Best New Poets 2006 and Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas. A former Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, he now lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York and teaches at Bard College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“Tonight, the uneven darkness is equal parts bold and apologetic. It’s the shabby moonlight epiphanies are made for, but I’m not due for an epiphany. I’m due for something lower in my body, something akin to the warming of hands by a mug of something hot.”

—excerpt from “God’s Shins”

Copyright The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299227340
• ISBN 13: 9780299227340
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 87