The Wages of Goodness: Poems (Volume 1) - Softcover

Blumenthal, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826208339 ISBN 13: 9780826208330

Publisher: University of Missouri, 1992

Synopsis

In The Wages of Goodness Michael Blumenthal explores the costs and the wages of three ruling obsessions in our lives:  love, grief, and virtue.  Reacting to a tendency in contemporary poetry to avoid such "sentimental" and abstract notions as goodness, Blumenthal succeeds in making ideas live through the particulars of each poem.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal is Briggs-Copeland Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University. He is the author of four previous books of poems, most recently Against Romance.

From Library Journal

This poet's fifth book is as notable for its moral gravitas as for its lyrical grace. Blumenthal meditates on fatherhood, personal history, love, loss, and gain as intertwined threads of life's mingled yarn. "Elegy for My Mother: The Days," the centerpiece of the book, is a major poem that, while speaking from personal experience, moves us by addressing the human condition at its most essential. Stylistically, the verse shows a colloquial ease that never declines into prosy slackness; his point of view is personal without being overly self-referential. Blumenthal credits the unhappy prospect that "the wages of goodness/ are oblique and obscure, and not even assured/in some happy ending," yet affirms the need to "keep singing into the light of this darkening world." A fine book.
- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0826208339
• ISBN 13: 9780826208330
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64