The Green Lake Is Awake - Softcover

Ceravolo, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890217 ISBN 13: 9781566890212

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1994

Synopsis

Winner, 1994 American Award for Literature: Belles Lettres. "[A] valuable contribution to American poetics."--Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author

The first recipient of the Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry, Joseph Ceravolo created several astonishing collections of poetry before his early death. Born in New York, he earned his living as a hydraulics engineer. The Green Lake is Awake is the first major book in over twenty-five years to make Ceravolo’s work widely available.

Reviews

Ceravolo (winner of the Frank O'Hara Prize) forces poetry to the brink of linguistic destruction in his posthumous collection, a work that is so obtuse that it disregards the reader's need to be part of the creative process. Yet the strangest part of this collection is the endorsement it receives from its editors. These men are respected poets in their own right, and for them to honor these poems is astonishing. Kenneth Koch states in the introduction, "What these lines say, in a prose way, doesn't make sense in an ordinary way." Unfortunately, "these lines" fail to make sense on the grammatical, linguistic, or pragmatic plane of reality, either. For example, try to connect with the following lines: "Hold me/till only, these are my/ clothes I sit./Give them more songs than/ the flower/these are my clothes to a/boat streets/have no feeling/Clouds move." These poems seem to be random words cut and pasted from a dictionary, ignoring poetic craft. Not recommended.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This valuable contribution to American poetics restores Ceravolo's boldly asyntactic yet stunningly precise work to book form. A New York-born hydraulics engineer, the poet died in 1988 at the age of 54. Although he received recognition early on, including the Frank O'Hara Award for Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968), his reputation, as evidenced by the sextet who edited this volume, has been highest among his fellow poets. His work, blending the sound-sculpting of a Clark Coolidge with deceptively calm, Ashbery-like meditations, carries within it an original and bewitching prosody as delicate as anything in Hopkins. As Kenneth Koch notes in his introduction, Ceravolo's poems "take place in a context of simplicity, quietness, and directness. They aren't avant-garde explosions for their own sake, but occur when they are necessary to the difficult, exciting expressions of whatever has to be said."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890217
• ISBN 13: 9781566890212
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 150
• Editor: Fagin Et Al. Larry