The Urban Stampede: and Other Poems - Softcover

Reeve, F. D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870135945 ISBN 13: 9780870135941

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 2002

Synopsis

This new collection of poems by F.D. Reeve includes "The Urban Stampede", a dramatic narrative in poetic form, and twenty-four lyric poems. "The Urban Stampede" is a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. It is the third such narrative from Reeve, as he attempts to rehouse grand myths from fallen cultures into the consciousness of today, seeking to show the enduring power of language itself and to bring spectator, poet, and performer together in the same place. These narratives include spoken voice and singing and are shaped by a careful underlying distancing―the basic characteristic of narrative poetry. In this way, a well-known story is coolly evaluated for cultural change and linguistic difference. In both the long poem, which is the centerpiece of this collection, and in the shorter poems, Reeve takes risks in order to explore the meaning that poetry gives to life-an immediately apprehensible vision apt in size and shape to our idea of the world, one in which the language of hands speaks to a guiding practical faith and the language of the mind leads to understanding and delight.

About this title

About the Author

F. D. Reeve has published approximately two dozen books of fiction, translations, and poetry. His honors include the New England Poetry Society's Golden Rose award and an award in literature from the American Academy National Institute of Arts and Letters. He earned a D. Lit. from New England College, and lives in Wilmington, Vermont. Reeve was once a Hudson River longshoreman and has spent years walking the earth, journeying out from his home state Vermont, over hills and through valleys from Mendocino to Murom, from Culebra to Komarovo. Reeve is the founding editor of Poetry Review. Currently he is a professor of letters emeritus at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

Franklin Delano Reeve, the septuagenarian professor of letters at Wesleyan, is a prolific poet (Concrete Music; The Moon and Other Failures) and translator from the Russian. His latest volume includes a 34-page-long title poem in dialogue, much in the format of W.H. Auden's classic "Age of Anxiety," retelling the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. Performed in 2000 in a London pub with narrators and musical accompaniment, Reeve's "Urban Stampede" garnered good reviews, but on the page it can seem achingly awkward: "and the coffee is richer and sweeter/ than any place else you might treat her," goes one difficult rhyme. Elsewhere what may be meant as wry, accessible verse reads as facile, such as a chorus that reads, "No need to go to school/ to play it cool; don't be a fool; you make your own rules./ The first one, like in thermodynamics,/ or pottery when you break some ceramics,/ says you keep all the pieces./ Like having nephews and nieces." By contrast, a 24-page section of "Other Poems" contains more successful efforts, such as a well-observed scene in a Chinese food market, "Three Fish": "Like Madame DeFarge at the scaffold, they cast their cold eyes/ on each comer: Who bid you sail/ from the sea into this frozen despair?" Despite such moments, inquisitive browsers would do better to start with Reeve's earlier books and Russian translations to get a real idea of this still-ambitious writer. (Jan.)Forecast: Reeve is the father of actor-director Christopher Reeve. This modest book could attract a larger house's interest in a selected.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870135945
• ISBN 13: 9780870135941
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 67