Rumors of Separate Worlds - Softcover

Coles, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877452601 ISBN 13: 9780877452607

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1989

Synopsis

Robert Coles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, a leading child psychiatrist, a compassionate and thoughtful essayist, and a sensitive, deeply moving poet. In his days as a medical student he had the good fortune to know Dr. William Carlos Williams, an experience which has remained lasting for Dr. Coles—and which has inspired Rumors of Separate Worlds.

Coles describes this volume of reflective poetry best, calling it "a mind's struggle to make sense of the world's apparently limitless ironies, ambiguities, contradictions, not to mention its fatefulness, the rule of luck, the reign of the arbitrary, the accidental in our lives." Rumors of Separate Worlds aptly represents the life of one of our most humane and important writers and thinkers.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and writer who has spent his life doing documentary work. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

This second volume of poetry is primarily for those intrigued by the Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist's nonfiction ( Children of Crisis ). Here Coles turns to his own experiences, and the humanity of his vision redeems the flatness of his verse. "Remembering a World," the first section, consists of elegies; in "Miss Avery's Class," the narrator recalls his fifth-grade teacher discussing Abraham Lincoln: "Washington was the father, / He the son, who died / For us to be free, you and me." Transformation is the theme throughout the second part, "Meeting Worlds," encompassing Coles's travels among the poor of Managua, who "watch their sons become Sandinistas," as well as the narrator's Ohio-born wife, who moves South and evolves into "a Dixie partner." The last section, "On the Day Jesus Christ Was Born," is a 12-poem sequence evoking Christmases spent in such diverse locations as Belfast, New Mexico and Soweto.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0877452601
• ISBN 13: 9780877452607
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 90