The Engrafted Word: Poems - Softcover

Kirchwey, Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805056076 ISBN 13: 9780805056075

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1998

Synopsis

The graftings of flesh upon flesh, of history upon time and memory, of the New World on the Old, of language upon silence, of faith upon doubt: these are the graftings that form this third book of poems by Guggenhein Fellow and Rome Prize winner Karl Kirchwey. Whether he is writing of the intimate moment or the painfully personal, he reaches across time to link us to our past and to the larger universe of humankind. Kirchwey graces us with poetics of a high order even as he weaves the threads that tie this collection into a stunningly integrated whole. These are indeed poems that reward rereading.

About this title

About the Author

Called a "poet of sumptuous resources" by Amy Clampitt, Karl Kirchwey has been published in such places as Antaeus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Kirchwey is the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York's 92nd Street YM-YWHA.

Reviews

Delicately crafted and suffused with eros, the spare, lucid poems of Kirchwey's third collection continue mapping the ghostly presences conjured by travel and the historical imagination. Lingering first in New England, this poet's quiet classicism gradually unveils the falling empire of late-antiquity Rome, quarries in Tunisia and Passion Week on the decaying island of Ischia. "Roman Spring" presents juxtapositions that reveal the city's competing incarnations: "jasmine and excrement; flowering capers;/ the salt sea smell behind the smell of petroleum;// ...and a travertine curb polished like something priceless/ by the bus's slow turn as it grinds uphill." Building on the achievements of A Wandering Island (1990) and Those I Guard (1993), Kirchwey's impressive formalist tendencies emerge in "Villanelle," "The Wound" (a six-sestet ekphrasis of Verrocchio's Christ and Saint Thomas) and "The Horologium of Augustus," set in stanzas whose lines ingeniously imitate the exponential increments of the title's sundial. Devious, sardonic wit comes to the fore in "Arcadia" and "Syracuse," both of which parody the excesses of a traveler's expectations. Other poems are unexpectedly personal: the paired sonnets "Zoo Story" and "In Transit" find the poet arrested by objects and places that recall his late mother and father, and "Tiber Island" becomes the setting for a poignant elegy for Amy Clampitt. Whatever weathered sites Kirchwey's lyrics visit, they contain fresh, theatrical mysteries and sustain the awareness of an uneasy fit between the real and ideal. (Apr.) FYI: Kirchway is director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York City.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The most distinguishing characteristic of a Kirchwey poem is its pace. Whether by a word choice that challenges the vocabulary, a title or theme that does not readily yield to understanding, or an event described with such closeness and concision that it conceals the larger view, each verse unfolds slowly, gently forcing the reader's attention to its light. The startling first poem begins with the oblique "Something of deskwork and pornography/ through suculences of conducting gel" and ends with an eloquent and direct address: "The world of line and measure somewhat darkly/ honors you in this glass, child: all your hands/ will make, all your body will savor,/ your mind consider, or your heart regret,/ seeking your whole life for such immanence." What Kirchwey (Those I Guard, Harcourt, 1993) achieves is an art where no word is out of place and a tone that is nearly perfect. Recommended.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., Univ. Park
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805056076
• ISBN 13: 9780805056075
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80