The Impossible Toystore: Poems - Softcover

Perlberg, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807126152 ISBN 13: 9780807126158

Publisher: LSU Press, 2000

Synopsis

Mark Perlberg's poems are deeply felt, their language concrete, alive, moving. Whether his verses are about his family, meditations on time and memory, love poems, or even ghost narratives, his concerns are broadly humane. His voice is sometimes lyric, sometimes narrative -- often in the same poem -- but always unmistakably his own.
The largely autobiographical Part I opens the collection with moving poems about the poet's family -- his overeducated maternal grandfather, his mother, the dead father the boy never really knew. The tone darkens in Part II includes a powerful recollection of Perlberg's own heart surgery and brief but wrenching Holocaust poems based on a trip to Prague: "An old Jew dreams...the Grand Rabbi/ has forgotten all the secret names of God" ("Kabbala").
In Part III Perlberg offers love poems and continues his lifelong preoccupation with East Asia. Verses about childhood fill Part IV, with a memory of the spicy smell of burning, discarded Christmas trees; a touching tribute to the enduring influence of the poet's first grade teacher; and recollections of carefree summer days.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Perlberg is the author of two previous books of poems, The Burning Field and The Feel of the Sun. A founder and longtime president of The Poetry Center of Chicago, he lives in Chicago with his wife.

From Booklist

The poems in this collection often suggest that the poet is an old man, and, concerned as most of them are with memories and time, they are as potentially poignant as a song like "Sunrise, Sunset" or "It Was a Very Good Year." But their freshness of vision, acuity of language, and easy rhythms have nothing autumnal about them. Instead, they have the past-as-present impact of a good anecdote and the vividness of realistic, sociological short stories, such as John O'Hara's. "Ivar" indelibly conjures the poet's well-bred, ultimately useless grandfather. "What Happened in the Woods" sharply re-creates an eerie coincidence experienced by some boys biking home after a movie. "The Floating World" brings back living in Japan 30 years ago as if it were a film unreeling. Shorter poems--reflections roused by artworks and personal mementos--have less narrative in them but no less vitality and presence. Perlberg adeptly uses his own circumstances, experiences, and reactions to express a love of the world that is, perhaps, universally appealing. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807126152
• ISBN 13: 9780807126158
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72