The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 - Softcover

Palmer, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811213838 ISBN 13: 9780811213837

Publisher: New Directions, 1998

Synopsis

The Lion Bridge, Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer's extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly avant-garde, Palmer's work has a matchless beauty, difficult to describe: as Common Knowledge remarked, "Even more than its music, it emanates silence." The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. This generous chronological selection includes individual poems, selections from serial poems, and two complete serial poems. Together the poems form a bridge, a kind of work-biography which takes a long look at an extraordinary achievement and gives a new view of a body of work as the poet himself wishes it to be seen. It also rescues from limbo so much material that has gone out of print. The Lion Bridge presents work from seven of his books: Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in 1943, Michael Palmer has written twenty books of poetry and recently published his selected essays, Active Boundaries (New Directions). He has been acclaimed “one of America’s most important poets: startlingly lyrical and visceral” (The Harvard Review).

Review:

"Palmer has managed to view (as a very traditional poet once put it) two worlds at once: to have brought the psychological insights and mimetic rewards we expect from older kinds of poetry into momentary conjunction with the comparatively asocial, startling, elusive pleasures of the new. -- Boston Review

All Those Words We Once Used
As A Real House
As If By Saying 'morning' On January 8th
Autobiography
Autobiography 2 (hellogoodby); For A.c.
Barely Anything To Say, Everything Said. But You Break, As A Hooded
Book Of The Yellow Castle
The Comet
Crossing The Hill
Dance Of The Bees: September
Dear M
Dearest Reader
Desire Was A Quotation From Someone
Disclosures
Eighth Sky
The End Of The Ice Age And Its Witnesses
Erolog
Facades For Norma Cole
False Portrait Of D.b. As Niccolo Paganini
Far Away Near
Fifth Prose
Fifth Symmetrical Poem
Figure
First Figure
For L.z.
For Voice
Fourth Symmetrical Poem
French For April Fools'
He Stopped Part Way Across The Field To
The Heron Is Riding
Holy Tuesday
A Hundred Years Ago I Made A Book
I Am An Architect In Vienna
I Have Answers To All Your Questions. My Name Is The Word For Wall
I Was Talking To The Baroness
Ideas Aren't Worth Anything
Idem 1
Idem 2
Idem 3
Idem 4
Imitate Me Says The Elm
In The Empire Of Light
Its Form
'kn'
Lens
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 1
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 2
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 3
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 4
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 5
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 6
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 7
Letters To Zanzotto: Letter 8
The Library Is Burning
Lies Of The Poem
A Man Undergoes Pain Sitting At A Piano
'march '93'
The Meadow
Men Without Arms Their Heads In A Box
Music Rewritten
Ninth Symmetrical Poem
Notes For Echo Lake 1
Notes For Echo Lake 11
Notes For Echo Lake 2
Notes For Echo Lake 3
Notes For Echo Lake 4
Notes For Echo Lake 5
O You In That Little Bark
Of This Cloth Doll Which (sarah's Fourth)
On The Way To Language
The Order Of Islands Here
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 1. H
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 2. Construction Of The Museum
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 3. (april '91)
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 4. H
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 5. Wheel
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 6. 24 Logics In Memory Of Lee Hickman
Poems Within A Matrix For War: 7. 'or Anything Resembling It'
Portrait Now Before Them
Pre-petarchan Sonnet
Prelude
The Project Of Linear Inquiry
Prose 22
Prose 31: The Logic Of Contradictions
Prose 9
A Reasoned Reply To Gilbert Ryle
Recursus
Red Yellow Blue
Seven Forbidden Words
She Says, Into The Dark
Sign
So The Dark Figure
Song Of The Round Man
Sonnet: Now I See Them
Speech (across Time)
Symmetrical Poem: They Were Afraid Of Death
Tenth Symmetrical Poem
The Theory Of The Flower
Third Symmetrical Poem
This Is Difficult But Not Impossible: Coffee
This Time
To Learn What To Say To Unlearn
To Robert E. Symmes 1933
Tomb Of Baudelaire
Under The Perseids
Untitled (far Away Near)
Untitled (september '92)
The Village Of Reason
A Vitruvian Figure By Juan Gris
Voice And Address
We Will Call Today
Without Music
A Word
Words Say, Mispell And Mispell Your Name
Yes In A Circle
You Say
Execution Of Alice Holt
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Although often analyzed as a poetry of ideas--Wittgenstein in verse--Palmer's is in fact intensely somatic, gestural...Always in Palmer one gets the feeling of the language trying to get outside by undoing itself, by unraveling the complex fabric of language to feel its threads, yes, but perhaps also to see through it to what is behind and beyond it....'Did they really run out of things/or was it only the names for things/in that radical sublimity, that/daubed whiteness, final/cleansing and kindness perfect/snow or perfection of snow/leaving us peering at the bridge.' At Passages leaves us peering at the bridge, at what we don't yet know. But it has gotten us to the bridge, to a going-on. And in these cursed times, that is a singular achievement. -- David Levi-Strauss, The Nation

Michael Palmer has been one of the most influential writers in recent years, perhaps because he fuses contemporary concerns about syntax and meaning production with some very ancient poetic pleasures. -- The Village Voice

Palmer is one of the most important poets in terms of...political or aesthetic implications. -- Leonard Schwartz, Poetry Project Newsletter, December 2004/January 2005

[A] work of muted beauty, slant morality, and a keen, impious compassion. -- Village Voice Literary Supplement, October 1998

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0811213838
• ISBN 13: 9780811213837
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276