The Radiance of Pigs: Poems - Hardcover

Rice, Stan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375404856 ISBN 13: 9780375404856

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

Stan Rice's poems are outside the circle of coventional poetry in their adherence to the strong, expressionist drive which makes his work so interesting as well as entirely his own.

People tend to have strong opinions about his work, which led Publisher's Weekly to describe an
earlier volume of new and selected poems, Singing Yet, as "serious stuff, urgent and original."

His last book, Fear Itself, in its wild unpredictability, received praise from Graham Christian in Library Journal as follows: "Rice is an expert practitioner of the paranoiac-surreal; he walks the disquieting dreamscape familiar from the work of such poets as Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic . . . His true
subject is the uneasy equation between horror and beauty, the 'liquification of flame' and the horror of order. He is often capable of delivering the instructive surprises of the best poetry."

The same doomsday energy and observation suffuse his new work.

About this title

About the Author

Stan Rice is the author of five collections of poetry, including Fear Itself and Singing Yet. For many years he was associated with San Francisco State University, where he was Professor of English and Creative Writing, Assistant Director of the Poetry Center, and Chairman of the Creative Writing Department. He has been the recipient of the Edgar Allen Poe Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and a writing fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, the novelist Anne Rice.

From the Inside Flap

poems are outside the circle of coventional poetry in their adherence to the strong, expressionist drive which makes his work so interesting as well as entirely his own. <br><br>People tend to have strong opinions about his work, which led <i>Publisher's Weekly</i> to describe an<br>earlier volume of new and selected poems, <b>Singing Yet</b>, as "serious stuff, urgent and original." <br><br>His last book, <b>Fear Itself</b>, in its wild unpredictability, received praise from Graham Christian in <i>Library Journal</i> as follows: "Rice is an expert practitioner of the paranoiac-surreal; he walks the disquieting dreamscape familiar from the work of such poets as Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic . . . His true<br>subject is the uneasy equation between horror and beauty, the 'liquification of flame' and the horror of order. He is often capable of delivering the instructive surprises of the best poetry." <br><br>The same doomsday energy a

Reviews

Divided into a triptych, this sixth collection opens with the poet looking back on Childhood, moves on to a private Hades and finally re-emerges through a hard-won Resurrection. For Rice, all affections are fixed by the age of 12long experience teaches us only how to love at the end what you loved/ At the beginning. He playfully rejects Yeatss desire to be hammered gold and longs to be mercury instead (When I Grow Up). Such modest claims make for gem-like lyrics at their best, and reflexive self-examination at their worst. A heros journey, the book has gloriously wry moments, as in Early Spring, which comes After flesh falters, after/ The eyes we knew look at us/ As a stranger./ Its early spring again./ Natures voluptuous skeleton/ Sits up! Many of the poems seem tonally akin to childrens verse, as in Mother Butterfly: Stay busy, Mother, you/ White butterfly,/ Whose only friend,/ The brown butterfly, is dead. Or as in A Black Cat: Cats dont shake dry / Like a dog. Not this/ Cat, this day. Froze,/ And hissed, /What I have missed I have missed. The title of this collection itself suggests a marriage of innocence and experience, an ambition fulfilled in a poem like His Life Story, which concludes with the metamorphosis of a Prince who Fell from his armchair/ Like dogfood,/ Kuh-shlop./ Relieved of his rodeo buckle./ Lowered into the honeysuckle. These poems are the kind of lowering from which one looks up with a grin.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Yes, it is surreal," insists Rice, describing the passage of time on the opening page of The Radiance of Pigs, his sixth book of poetry. By turns compelling, grotesque, and poignant, Rice's work chronicles the tripartite structure of his life (Childhood, Hades, and Resurrection) in nightmarishly unforgettable imagery: "blood-splashed" butter or snowmen made of "crystal vomit." Rice perceives a world of terrifying beauty where sex becomes a "black pig in a peach" and spring arrives when "silver lipstick is/ On the Japanese plum." In this refigured world, Latin is spoken in pickup trucks, a venue where Rice finds himself "meeting Satan in the parking lot." The key characters in this poetical autobiography are the poet's famous wife, Anne, and his dead father (the subject of bizarre and oddly moving elegies, "Don't Put Him in the Freezer" and "Dad Is Dead"). Readers will readAand rereadAthese poems because of their strange beauty and uncompromising honesty: "The experience isn't the vision./ Writing about it is the vision." Highly recommended for all poetry collections.ADaniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Mother Goose"

If you are death-haunted
Never drink beer, my
Dear, or you might drown
In your unshed tears.
I take my tone
From Mother Goose,
Who was a sot, and look
What it got her: shoes
Full of children, talking
Foxes, crooked men,
Fornicating spoons and dishes,
Most of chaos, compulsively
Rhyming. Everything
Had so much meaning
Naturally she was death-haunted.
All she wanted was to
Stop dreaming, but that being
An empty wish, she kept on drinking.
At least it made her woes delicious.
When the beer cans reached her ceiling
They started breeding, of course.
More chaos, more meaning.
She was as fecund as fear
And beer was her semen. So
If you are death-haunted too,
Don't drink beer, dear, or like
Mother Goose you might forget
How to cry out "Enough!", go berserk,
Sleep with your sons as soon as theyre born
And slip down and break your hip in the afterbirth.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375404856
• ISBN 13: 9780375404856
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 89