The Thread: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

Sandy, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807122580 ISBN 13: 9780807122587

Publisher: LSU Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this powerful collection, Stephen Sandy gathers his most striking poems from five previous books written over thirty-five years and adds memorable new ones to present a brilliant retrospective on his career to date. On a wide array of subjects, Sandy’s distinctive voice resonates as he proves himself to be a master of form, presentation, and passion.

Sandy has lived in some of the world’s great urban centers and captures in these poems essential vibrations of modern and postmodern life. “Are the rats little / Buddhas? Poisoned by the old / lady upstairs they still play.” He writes compellingly of Japan and of rural New England, and remembers a marine in Vietnam: “You lose the thread on which your life depends / And never hear the shot that rips you through.”

What emerges in this remarkably diverse compilation is an unforgettable take on American experience that rearranges reality in a singular but truthful and familiar way. We see ourselves through Sandy’s eyes with a fresh understanding. At once sensuous, philosophical, and enlightening, the poems in The Thread lead us to an unaccustomed vision of our lives, the beliefs and enigmas that inform them.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Sandy is a professor of literature at Bennington College and author of five previous books of poetry, most recently Thanksgiving Over the Water, and one volume of criticism.

Reviews

With an admirable reverence for the formal narratives of Robert Frost, Sandy (Thanksgiving over the Water) writes sometimes dense, sometimes simple narrative poems that are colloquial yet steeped in a love of attaining the grander sweep of poetic utterance. This survey of Sandy's six books over more than 30 years of work reflects a career's worth of formally eclectic dialogues with Frost and other masters of the tradition at large. There are fine poems written in carefully metered stanzas, for example, such as "Words for Dr. [I.A.] Richards" ("Say he's not hard on her,/ Just hard. Make no mistake./ His tiffs, his lusts were pure;/ No violence is fake"), baroque in their play of sounds and syntax. Other poems suggest the epic tradition as taken up by Pound, or the abstract despair of Eliot, as in "Ed Quid Amabo Nisi Quod Aenigma Est": "Madness may well/ be a crowded mind. But fury comes to the/ stripped life. The soul that would survive its strife/ grows/ accident-prone, carefully careless/ with its flesh." There are also a number of experiments with the lines of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, which mingle freely with the formal verse and are written from a similar excitement about America and things American. If lacking the kind of major, oeuvre-centering pieces to which Sandy often seems to be aspiring, the volume is filled with affecting and enjoyable performances, impressive in execution and in perceptive detail.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807122580
• ISBN 13: 9780807122587
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208