Bluestone: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

Lasdun, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374220557 ISBN 13: 9780374220556

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

Synopsis

A generous selection that shows the poet James Lasdun at his lyrically inventive best

Two men grapple with jumper cables, trying "to make a stand // in this last corner of our realm; machinery . . ." A man on his way to see his therapist encounters a female police officer in an elevator and feels himself regressing to "the original essence, the masculine / criminal salt." A teenager is tricked into eating a spoonful of lime pickle by his girlfriend's father. An Englishman in the Catskills ponders the nature of exile, is chased by yellow jackets, gets a haircut. James Lasdun's subjects are often quotidian―but his treatment of them never is. Under his transformative gaze, the familiar becomes strange, the local becomes foreign, and the minor becomes epic.

Lasdun has been winning acclaim since his first collection, 1988's A Jump Start―Helen Vendler has lauded his ability to give "brisk shape to contemporary and classical events"; The New York Times has praised the "sharp, slicing imagery" of his work. Now, in Bluestone, which selects from all three of his previous collections and includes poems from his fourth, Water Sessions, previously available only in the U.K., readers will be able to appreciate the full sweep of this capacious talent: his delicate wit, his gift for invention, his keen observational eye. It is a gathering that affirms Lasdun's position as, to quote Anthony Hecht, one of "the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English."

About this title

About the Author

James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published novels as well as several collections of short stories and poetry. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the Los Angeles Times, T. S. Eliot, and Forward prizes in poetry, and he was the winner of the inaugural BBC National Short Story Award. His nonfiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374220557
• ISBN 13: 9780374220556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176