Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Wojahn, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822959178 ISBN 13: 9780822959175

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Synopsis

Interrogation Palace is a career-spanning selection of work from an important American poet, drawing upon each of David Wojahn’s six previous collections and a substantial gathering of new work. Moving fluently from personal history to public history, and from high culture to popular culture, Wojahn’s searching and restless poetry has been considerably acclaimed, both for the candor of its testimony and the authority of its formal invention. He is above all an elegiac poet, tender and ferocious by turns, whether mourning the loss of family and loved ones or the hopes and aspirations of the baby-boomer era. Interrogation Palace confirms David Wojahn’s status as one of the most inventive, passionate, and ambitious figures of his generation.

About this title

About the Author

David Wojahn is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Poet's Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

From the Back Cover

"Interrogation Palace shows that David Wojahn has been faithful to his vision. Never afraid of the arcane and experimental, he somehow keeps both feet in this world and propels us through an inner sanctum of angels and rock music, soothsayers and popular history, and philosophers and postmodern mystery. At the heart of Wojahn's poetry is the raw data of pain and joy. This wonderful poet knows how to conjure laughter through a witty, earthy language." --Yusef Komunyakaa

"The astonishing impact of Interrogation Palace marks off David Wojahn as a formal innovator, a poet that every poet of whatever generation needs to read, and needs to read now: as erudite as any of the Moderns, but much wilder in his range of reference, his deeply felt and wonderfully intelligent poems meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet." --Tom Sleigh

"This is a book of journeys into the night-towns and underworlds of personal failure and loss as well as public tragedy and travesty. Few poets display such formal dexterity and invention while so free of trifles as David Wojahn. In extraordinary and weighty collocations that plunge the heart, these poems refuse easy consolation; they wander among ruins and ghosts in ways we would not be wrong to call heroic." --Dean Young

"After September 11th, one of the first living poets I thought of was David Wojahn: someone who could follow our tragedy to its grave depths, with dignity and unsparingness, and egolessness, and who would stay with it--and us--as long as need be. For life. His poetry is, as Norman Dubie has said, the poetry of conscience; and here, at the birth of our new century, we are grateful." -Jean Valentine on Spirit Cabinet

Reviews

Adding nine new poems (one of them a massive sequence) to selections from his six previous books, this mid-career selection shows what amplitudes Wojahn's poems now possess and how they got that way. Brief excerpts from Icehouse Lights (1982)—his Yale Younger Poets prize debut—show the tough-guy voice with which he began; more fun, and smarter, are segments from Mystery Train (1990), whose sonnet sequence recounted the history of rock and roll. Late Empire (1994) showed a poet newly at home in the jeremiad, comparing the firebombing of "Dresden and its million pounds of napalm" to "the singer clubbing his guitar to wire/ and splinters on the stage." Heroes and villains, ancients and moderns, proliferated in the subsequent work, which adapted Latin models (Virgil, Catullus, Propertius) and sometimes mourned Wojahn's late wife, the poet Lynda Hull. This sternly chosen sampling should strengthen, if not alter, Wojahn's reputation as an elegist, autobiographer and poetic historian—sometimes as all three at once. Those who already know his strengths will rejoice in the new work, especially in the remarkable and well-informed protest poems. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822959178
• ISBN 13: 9780822959175
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216