The Violence of the Morning: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry) - Softcover

Bedient, Cal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082032390X ISBN 13: 9780820323909

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2002

Synopsis

This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope―from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid―sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.

About this title

About the Author

CAL BEDIENT is the author of several books, including a previous collection of poems, Candy Necklace, and works of criticism such as He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist and In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Day Is Extreme When There Is No Frame

Massive growths in the tumors, the liver
a sea of Leviathans. Space has identified you,
you can be cornered now, in every corner
of the sea. Your new straw hat with the brown
satin band and splash of white orchids
lies on the dresser in the dawn-dark
as on a rocky shore. Wake, my love,
break the faint snore that starts and stops
like a motor that won't catch
somewhere out at sea, take up your hat,
in which you were young again yesterday,
your blue eyes so beautiful, and wave it
at the violence of the morning.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 082032390X
• ISBN 13: 9780820323909
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112