Back Principles: a book of spiritual fatigue - Softcover

Bett, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609643100 ISBN 13: 9781609643102

Publisher: BlazeVOX [books], 2018

Synopsis

Like all Stephen Bett’s recent books, his 22nd, Back Principles: a book of spiritual fatigue, is a serial poem, “minimalist” in its poetics, and subtle enough to sustain repeated readings. The title is self-explanatory: poems journeying between poles, searching out the buddha and the christ. There are no (cheap) instant gratification I found its here. There never could be of course; it’s all journey, all the time.

Reviews of Stephen Bett’s recent The Gross and Fine Geography: New & Selected Poems:

I do like this type of writing, with its outcome of impropriety: the stumbling, reversals, jesting, equivocality, the wrong beat in the wrong place, the offbeat. As long as the image is diaphanous and the music upright, verbal grandiosity is never needed. The fissure attracts the curious more than the polished stone… From the sidewalk of matter (language) Bett journeys the way to the Divine, and what is divined is immateriality, that which comes betwixt breath and breath. Simply put, Bett is one heaven of a love poet. His poems are about love, the love of woman, the love of justice, the love of music, poetry, and art. He lifts the sidewalk up to the brink on a platform where few care to stand…

In, beneath, and above each single word and space, Stephen Bett’s Selected Poems recalls the story of his experiences; his poems are diary entries, reworked transience. He sings, he screams, he doubts, he cries, he tears everything apart, and then glues the world back together, one piece at a time. From “too many maybes” we venture to something where “it’s like the world turns in the sky.” Matter mutates into Stephen Bett’s jive. Antonio D'Alfonso, Pacific Rim Review of Books

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet. His earlier work is known for its sassy, edgy, hip... caustic wit—indeed, for the askance look of the serious satirist... skewering what he calls the vapid monoculture' of our times. His more recent books have been called an incredible accomplishment for their authentic minimalist subtlety. Many are tightly sequenced book-length 'serial' poems, which allow for a rich echoing of cadence and image, building a wonderfully subtle, nuanced music. Bett follows in the avant tradition of Don Allen's New American Poets. Hence the mandate for Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Literature Collection to purchase and archive his "personal papers" for scholarly use. He is recently retired after a 31-year teaching career largely at Langara College in Vancouver, and now lives with his wife Katie in Victoria, BC.

Edition details

• Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609643100
• ISBN 13: 9781609643102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120