The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

Cassity, Turner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821412213 ISBN 13: 9780821412213

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional composer—Camille Saint-Saëns, say, or Richard Strauss—who does not doubt that the music is the score and the score is the music. That is, poetry is verse and verse is poetry.

Given that confidence, he is prepared to take on any subject. In the forty years he has been publishing, Mr. Cassity has never once written about nothing. Without being predictable, his material nevertheless has certain orientations: colonialism, the military, the Sun Belt, popular culture, Biblical figures, the Muslim countries, architecture, technology, banking…Although he can be a relentless satirist—idealists are repeatedly savaged—he has surprising sympathies. NCO Clubs should erect a monument to him.

Now and then he writes a personal poem, though one suspects it is with some effort. Most of his oeuvre is very impersonal third person. Mr. Cassity’s work makes one realize that there is a difference between a truly intellectual poem and a mindless poem on an intellectual subject.

Although the author suggested that students of Western Imperialism would have a special interest in this book, we would recommend it to readers of first-rate contemporary poetry as well.

About this title

About the Author

Turner Cassity was born in 1929 in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. He retired in 1991 as a catalog librarian at the R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

Reviews

paper 0-8214-1222-1 Cassity adds over 40 new poems to selections from his previous seven volumes in this formidable collection, spanning some 30 years of versifying by a mostly unheralded master. This self-styled curmudgeon also includes some uncollected poems from a sequence based on the Flash Gordon comic strip and a series of poems on military lifeboth of which give a good indication of Cassitys unusual range in subject, as well as why hes probably been overlooked by most critics. An itinerant poet, surveying mankind from Curacao to Indonesia, he turns his gimlet eye on the ironies of colonialism (Rondo on the Rio Negro), the persistence of faith (The Mount of the Holy Cross), and the politics of architecture (Architecture 101''). As jaded as Naipaul, as funny as early Waugh, Cassity turns phrases upside down, and pieties inside out, in forms that are at once pithy and meticulous. He baits readers with his deliberately unfashionable statements (on commerce, labor, homelessness, meat-eating, and the novelist James Jones) and appeals to the antique notions of Folly, Fortune, and Time. For this cynic, aware that sin is our beginning, humor is a fit ending, and he provides it bitter and sweet. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821412213
• ISBN 13: 9780821412213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260