The Ledge: Poems - Hardcover

Collier, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618050140 ISBN 13: 9780618050147

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

Synopsis

A new collection of poems by the director of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference walks a line between day-to-day things and the "unknown," telling stories from the heart of the American experience.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Collier has been the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for five years and has taught English at the University of Maryland, College Park, for fifteen years. His previous volumes of poetry are THE CLASP AND OTHER POEMS, THE FOLDED HEART, THE NEIGHBOR, and most recently THE LEDGE, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Collier is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the Discovery/The Nation Award, among other honors. He resides in Maryland.

Reviews

Collier builds many of his poems around a single incident, whether his speaker is caught lying, in naked boyhood, on a bathroom floor while his sisters conduct a mock-crucifixion, or is simply being captivated by a man who crashes through a country club's plate-glass door. In this, Collier's fourth book, such ruminations still have their descriptive charms, but generally lack the dramatic urgency necessary to sustain the book as a whole. At times, Collier attempts to up the ante by invoking the mythical likes of an Odysseus or Sisyphus, but such figures often end up being trivialized. In "Pay-Per-View," for example, Collier compares the distorted images of a scrambled hotel porno flick to Pandora's "winged souls that once escaped/ from her exquisite jar--the shadows of our pains, the venom/ carriers of our desires." A plethora of animal poems prove capable vehicles for some nice phrasal and observational turns: a snake's skin is "a loose diamond basket weave"; "The New Opossum" is an "upholder of middle-class values,/ and link to a romantic past"; while the "Brave Sparrow" is playfully exhorted to "Stay where you are, you lit fuse, you dull spark of saltpeter and sulfur." Still, domestic scenes that confront a young son with "the puddle of urine/ beneath the toilet" or the rabbit-killing dog of "A Real-Life Drama" don't reverberate in the manner Collier seems to be aiming for, making images like "[h]is cock,/ a huge suppurating rudder, stirred the sulfuric/ ocean of his realm" (describing Cerberus) seem desperate stays against bourgeois ennui. (Apr..--is cock,/ a huge suppurating rudder, stirred the sulfuric/ ocean of his realm" (describing Cerberus) seem desperate stays against bourgeois ennui. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A welcome new collection from a poet of distinction. Collier (The Neighbor; The Folded Heart) teaches at the University of Maryland and is director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He has won Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, as well as a Discovery/The Nation Award. These layered and textured poems are rendered with the kind of craftsmanship one might expect from a master woodworker or potter but finds all too seldom in poetry these days. The ledge alluded to in the books title is from ``Brave Sparrow,'' a poem that is important to the books overall meaning: ``Whose home is in the straw / and baling twine threaded / in the slots of a roof vent / who guards a tiny ledge / against the starlings / that cruise the neighborhood. . . .'' For all its vulnerability, the sparrow embodies the courage it takes to live in a precarious world, a metaphor still apt for the creative life, though by no means limited to that. Colliers line endings manage to be both crisp and sinewy, pulling the reader on through the twists and turns of a poem with many surprises along the way: ``If you think Odysseus too strong and brave to cry, / that the god-loved, god-protected hero / when he returned to Ithaka disguised, / intent to check up on his wife / and candidly apprize the condition of his kingdom, / steeled himself resolutely against surprise / and came into his land cold-hearted, clear-eyed, / ready for revengethen you read Homer as I did, / too fast. . . .'' Whether writing about the natural creatures of the world or about myth and personal history, Collier offers delight for both ear and mind. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The first poem in Collier's The Ledge contrasts the youthful reader who plunges ahead while reading Homer and the mature reader who lingers. It's an apt beginning to this fourth collection from the director of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference because one should linger over these elegant yet penetrating poems, which reading after reading yield startling truths.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Real-Life Drama

This dog standing in the middle of the street,
tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit,
its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws,
might have been forgiven or simply taken away

and shot under different circumstances
and no one would have said much, except his owner
who'd gone out into the yard at the start
of the commotion, having been involved

at other times with the dog's truancies, and yelled,
"Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!" but unavailing,
and everyone understanding that once more Bosco
had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature.

But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man
who'd raised the rabbit shouldn't husband something
so rare and beautiful he couldn't keep it
from the likes of Bosco.

-- Michael Collier from THE LEDGE. Copyright (C) 2000 by Michael Collier. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618050140
• ISBN 13: 9780618050147
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 60