HEROIC MEASURES - Hardcover

BERGMAN, DAVID

3.43 out of 5 stars

7 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814207839 ISBN 13: 9780814207833

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 1998

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"Here's the voice of Mozart's canary, a psychic in crisis, a naturalist stunned by another species more beautiful-and more human?-than our own. Here are poems of friendship and travel, the ravages of the epidemic, love and fear for aging parents, an elegy for the handsomest of hairdressers. David Bergman's compassionate book gives shape to the occasions of life." -Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria: Poems "Some of the best AIDS literature of any kind, [Bergman's poems] introduce characters who come alive and tell stories, not all directly about AIDS, that bring the poet and his anxieties to life too . . . poem after poem is fluent, intelligent, well-shaped, and memorable." -Booklist David Bergman's new collection, Heroic Measures, opens with a section of poems that speak directly of male relationships and desire. A second grouping depicts images of art, giving us glimpses of Goya, Eakins, Mozart, and Mapplethorpe. Other poems provide an enlightening journey into religion and myth. In the final section, Bergman turns to his family, with poems about his parents, their aging, and his childhood. The result of this structure is to show the course of a life as a progression backward to forward, the journeying, the false starts and successes of the pursuit of love and the practice of art set against the dangers and structures of the past and present. David Bergman is a professor English at Towson University. He won the George Elliston Poetry Prize for his first volume, Cracking the Code. He is also the author of Gaiety Transformed: Self-Representation in Gay American Literature, which was cited as an Outstanding Book of the Year by both Choice and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights.

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From Kirkus Reviews

paper 0-8142-0784-7 Towson State English professor and editor of numerous anthologies of gay fiction, Bergman (Cracking the Code) relies on his superb knowledge of traditional prosody in the various forms he so purposefully explores in this, his second collection. The short dialogue between Death and a beautiful Young Man, which opens the volume, sets the elegiac tone for a dozen or so graceful poems about AIDSfrom a witty portrait of a wild transvestite who died by accident, unlike his co-workers at the hair salon, each dead by disease, to a narrative about taking part in a clinical study of HIV. Days of the 1970s tells the history of the decade simply by its clever rhymes: AIDS, escapades, parades, and raids. Cats figure in poems about desertion by a lover and about memory of a friend recently dead. Bergmans transgressions against entropy include smart lyrics about grubs at night, planting a garden, a mockingbird that sounds like a car alarm, and a group of poems inspired by art and travel. A skilled narrative artist, Bergman tells the chilling tale of a psychic, consulted by the police, who realizes that a missing boy was killed by his mother, and he also captures the voice of a female primatologist who prefers her monkeys to men. Poems about his aging father, including the wonderful title piece, combine Bergmans campy charms with his expressive clarity: While his father asks that no heroic measures be taken to sustain his life, his son preserves that life quite elegantly in his own strong measures. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Benny
Bonzai For Beginners
The Care And Treatment Of Pain
Crazy Woman Falls, Wyoming
Daughters Denying The Dreams Of Their Father
Days Of The 1970s
Death And The Young Man
A Dream Of Nightingales
A Father's Blessings
Field Notes
The Fury Of Flowers
The Gifts Of Greece
Goya's Enlightenment
The Great Trans-atlantic Hot-air Balloon Race
The Guide Of Tiresias
Heroic Measures
In The Summer Crucible
In The Waiting Room
Mockingbird Moderne
My Father Almost Ascending
The North Country: 1. Along Hadrian's Wall
The North Country: 2. Durham Cathedral
The North Country: 3. A House Of Two Women
Old Voices At A New Number
A Part For Horn
The Path Of Least Resistance
Pictures At An Eakins Exhibition
Planting The Garden
Primal Scene
The Psalm Of Prometheus
Second Sight
Thanksgiving In Bucks Country
Tom's Cove, Assateague
Two Muses: 1. Mozart's Canary
Two Muses: 2. Mapplethorpe's Lily
While Sodom Was Occupied
The Window
The Witness To The Arrest
A World Of Difference
The Wrath Of Medea
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®