The Names of the Rapids (Juniper Prize for Poetry) - Hardcover

Holden, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087023501X ISBN 13: 9780870235016

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

Synopsis

This book is the winner of the 1985 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Holden is the author of six books, including three volumes of poetry. His Design for a House won the 1972 Devins Award and Leverage won the 1983 AWP Award for Poetry. President of the Kansas Associated Writing Programs, Holden is director of creative writing and professor of English at Kansas State University.

Review:

With The Names of the Rapids, Jonathan Holden comes into his own as a poet. The essential world of Holden's three previous volumes has not changed; he continues the sensuous evocation of family and small-town life begun in 1972, with Design for a House. He is still obsessed with fathering and baseball and cars, with the American landscape as a strange commingling of natural and human symbols. Once again he locates the real life, the life of the imagination, in the private past, which for this poet 'started back/ in New Jersey, the fifties, July nights/ of steam clogged with wisteria.' With Edward Hopper-like clarity, he offers in this new volume a subtle and inspiring portrait of American life. What distinguishes this volume from Holden's earlier work, and from most poetry now being written, is its amazing firmness, its sense of control... We can be grateful for such a book.

(Jay Parini, Middlebury College)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 087023501X
• ISBN 13: 9780870235016
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80