Pantheon and Other Poems - Hardcover

Asrelsky, Arnold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1440168792 ISBN 13: 9781440168796

Publisher: iUniverse, 2009

Synopsis

Drawing on myth, literature, and the Bible, Arnold Asrelsky's poems create surprising and illuminating connections between quotidian events and larger themes. In the stealing of a comforter, he sees the rupture of the social contract. In a father's pontificating at the dinner table, he hears the voice of the enthroned Zeus. In the works of a still life painter, he sees a secular way of celebrating the created world.

His poems range from the struggle for New York City's taxis to the eventual heat-death of the universe. His often witty language underscores the comedy inherent in man's longing for transcendence, but it is also suffused with sadness at the inevitable failure of such desires. Many of his poems reflect his love of Chinese poetry and his fascination with the thought of Zen and Daoism.

An important influence on the poet's development was his early discovery of Manhattan as a playground. Its streets introduced him to the world's culinary delights in Chinatown and Little Italy, among the Armenian restaurants of Murray Hill and the Greek restaurants of Times Square. The coffee shops of Greenwich Village were his debating halls where he and the other would-be intellectuals argued passionately and endlessly among the cups and croissants.

About this title

Review

A fine, deeply allusive collection of original poetry, Pantheon delivers a library's worth of literary wisdom in a few slim pages.

It should come as no surprise that the poetry by Asrelsky--a literature professor with more than three decades' experience--is literate. One early poem meditates on Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "Fabricators of dreams, / inconsolable wraiths, / we shall keep our hour, / and will await Godot." Another evokes the "Cold Mountain" poetry of the ninth-century Chinese bard Han Shan, "who walks the peaks / and drinks the clear, cold streams." A third, "Footnote to Paradise Lost," imagines the exiles from John Milton's Eden marveling at the birth of their first child, a "red thing struggling / between her thighs."

The author digs deeply into biblical myth and Greek lore, and Pantheon is nothing less than an exploration of the canon. But interspersed with such high speculation are more mundane reflections on aging ("Baldness"), work colleagues ("Secretary") and astrology ("Horoscope"). In bringing together the ordinary and the timeless, Asrelsky hopes to point out "connections between quotidian events and larger themes." This, of course, is the job of the English teacher--to show why Ovid, Dante and Frost are not only brilliant, but relevant. As a continuation of the author's pedagogy, then, Pantheon is a great success.

Asrelsky's accessible verse makes the old new again, brushing the dust off the old masters and compelling his readers to experience them anew, and with clearer eyes. In doing so, the poet brings past and present together, or, in his words, "The finished poem / redeems time." But even these are not his words, as he surely knows; they are Eliot's, and the apostle Paul's before him. His writing is a prism that delivers not only "Asrelsky," but the giants who precede him.

Erudite verse from a man of letters. --Kirkus Discoveries

About this edition

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1440168792
• ISBN 13: 9781440168796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 108