Planned Solstice (Kuhl House Poets) - Softcover

Greenberg, David Micah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877458588 ISBN 13: 9780877458586

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2003

Synopsis

Available September 2003 In David Greenberg's Planned Solstice, the natural and material worlds are provocatively juxtaposed, so as to affirm serious explorations of our place within them. Greenberg's considerations are vast, envigorating, and challenging; his poems take on charged historical and political subjects—civil wars at home and abroad, the World Trade Center's destruction, issues of race and difference—and handle them with utter aplomb and freshness.

These poems move from imagistic inquiry toward political coherence and a sense of divided place. The book's four-part structure also echoes seasonal change and seeks among extreme—solstice-like—experiences the hope that separate lives may speak to one another. Throughout, images of contested growth, natural and human, ask the reader to see what is both organic and structural in settings of consciousness, space, and politics—to find what is free and what is also formed by consequence. Greenberg's are not facile pronouncements; they come to us after such rigorous deliberation, such painstaking examination, that they cannot but carry a hint of the oracular about them.

The poems in Planned Solstice should be read, re-read, and re-read again, as they yield a new crop, “a decision of field,"”every time one dares to venture in.

From “Schoolyard with Boat”

The gull sweeps and its shadow into snow
furls—a steel share

as snow is in breathing motion like a bird
shaking snow from crest.

Miseducation risks correction within its own
frame. A crop

is a decision of field. Harbinger of space, white winter,
work with me while I live. When I do not, do not work.

About this title

About the Author

David Greenberg attended Yale University and the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University, organized with homeless men and women in New York, and was a policy advocate for the Coalition for the Homeless. Currently a doctoral candidate in urban policy at MIT, he works with a community development trade association in Massachusetts. His poems have been published in such journals as the Colorado Review, New Republic, and Ploughshares. Planned Solstice is his first book.

Reviews

With at least three poems ("The Hole in the Ocean," "Waltz Gourd," "Errand of Slate") destined eventually for anthologies, Planned Solstice, by New York poet David Micah Greenberg, is by turns frightening, hopeful, and lyrical, taking in the nexus of exigency and bureaucracy, eros and government, sensibility and violence-in all their cyclic seasonality: "In disagreements and sympathy origins/ countenance daily the ever-stricken plan/ whose conclusions seem inevitable only from that course."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877458588
• ISBN 13: 9780877458586
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70