My Secret Boat: A Notebook of Prose and Poems - Hardcover

Burkard, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039302833X ISBN 13: 9780393028331

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1990

Synopsis

Poems organized in the form of a notebook trace the author's development and evoke his memories, dreams, and experiences

About this title

Reviews

Burkard's ( Fictions from the Self ) work is an acquired taste. For those who wish a direct encounter with an elusive medium, his seventh book--particularly its prose poems--may well offer a transcendent experience. The author approaches and invokes language as a sensory thing before it is a source of knowledge; best appreciated in a state of primal, sentient innocence, his words refresh and transform the possibilities of pure perception, while avoiding language's usual obligation to inform. Burkard's carefully reduced stock of images is powerful: the sea, a lantern, snow, rain and ghosts figure in a fragmentary dream that recurs over the course of the volume as the narrator plies a pen ("my secret boat") to move through states of being, address sundry characters and espystet elements of plot. Claiming to learn most when seeking least, "standing / in an idea" or losing himself in what lies beyond himself, the speaker lends a voluminous consciousness to us that sympathetic readers will not soon forget.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039302833X
• ISBN 13: 9780393028331
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 85