Only Bread, Only Light: Poems - Softcover

Kuusisto, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591500 ISBN 13: 9781556591501

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2000

Synopsis

With this, his first collection of poetry, Stephen Kuusisto (author of the memoir Planet of the Blind) explores blindness and curiosity, loneliness and the found instruments of continuation. Exploiting the seeming contradiction of poetry’s reliance upon visual imagery with Kuusisto’s own sightlessness, these poems cultivate a world of listening: to the natural world, to the voices of family and strangers, to music and the words of great writers and thinkers.
Kuusisto has written elsewhere, "I see like a person who looks through a kaleidoscope; my impressions of the world at once beautiful and largely useless." So it is no surprise that in his poems mortal vision is uncertain, supported only by the ardor of imagination and the grace of lyric surprise. Sensually rich and detailed, Kuusisto’s poems are humorous, complex, and intellectually engaged. This collection reveals a major new poetic talent.

"Only Bread, Only Light"

At times the blind see light,
And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,

Grace among buildings—no one asks
For it, no one asks.

After all, this is solitude,
Daylight’s finger,

Blake’s angel
Parting willow leaves.

I should know better.
Get with the business

Of walking the lovely, satisfied,
Indifferent weather—

Bread baking
On Arthur Avenue

This first warm day of June.
I stand on the corner

For priceless seconds.
Now everything to me falls shadow

Stephen Kuusisto’s 1998 memoir Planet of the Blind received tremendous international attention, including appearances on Oprah, Dateline, and Talk of the Nation. The New York Times named it a "Notable Book of the Year" and praised it as "a book that makes the reader understand the terrifying experience of blindness, a book that stands on its own as the lyrical memoir of a poet." A spokesperson for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, Kuusisto teaches at Ohio State University.

About this title

Reviews

Planet of the Blind, a bestseller and New York Times Notable memoir that landed Kuusisto on Oprah, Dateline and other shows in 1998, has a companion volume in this slim, winning collection. Kuusisto successfully melds music, memory, and his wide-ranging erudition into quiet depictions of his experiences, presenting everything from evocations of a boyhood in Helsinki to earnest poems for Ted Berrigan, "Rachmaninoff's Curtains" and Ogden Nash. Some of its most powerful moments reside in the poet's accounts of his failing eyesight: "Each morning/ I live with less color:/ The lawn turns gray,/ The great-laurel is gravid/ With flint as if it might burn/ In the next life./ Even the persimmon tree/ Is clear as a wine stem." Showing considerable dexterity, Kuusisto also works at times in a more traditional style that draws on surrealism, folklore and metaphysical verse. While too many poems suffer from decorative passages and tidy closure, others show Kuusisto marshalling considerable skills to create finely tuned descriptions of events past and present. In its best moments, this book succeeds in rendering the world both beautiful and strange: "The trees are foreign soldiers/ Talking low in a different tongue." (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kuusisto wrote about his loss of vision with passion and candor in his unforgettable memoir, Planet of the Blind (1998). In his poems, works of spare and musing beauty, he takes a quieter and more reflective approach, and each word is set as carefully on the page as a footstep blindly taken in an unknown place. He portrays himself as a boy dwelling in the "estate of innocence," and conjures dawns and dusks in the New England and Finnish landscapes he knows so well. As he moves forward in time, he also animates realms of the imagination, worlds inspired by his "finger-reading" of Braille books. Music is a constant presence, and the tenuousness of being, a feeling made all the more daunting by sightlessness, is a steady preoccupation. But Kuusisto's poems are exquisitely visual, too, even as the poet moves "through space / With hands outstretched." Ultimately, Kuusito's meditations on his condition, and gratitude for the mind's inner eye, remind readers that vision takes many forms, and that feelings of being lost and alone are intrinsic to human nature. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556591500
• ISBN 13: 9781556591501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104