Just In: Word of Navigational Challenges: New and Selected Work - Softcover

Roberson, Ed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1883689791 ISBN 13: 9781883689797

Publisher: Talisman House, Publishers, 1998

Synopsis

Poetry. African American Studies. Michael Palmer writes, "Ed Roberson offers us, up front, the nerve-edge of poetic speech, sequences of the unanticipated, as poetry of real significance is meant to do. This generous and much-needed selection graphs the development of a poet committed to the articulation of a resistant, multi-faceted identity. It should affirm his place, at last, as one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time." JUST IN: WORD OF NAVIGATIONAL CHALLENGES is a chronicle of Roberson's works from 1970 to the present, marked throughout by a language derived from the rhythms of speech and the natural world: see in the river the ripples' / picture on the surface of the wind the lifting of the image / has taken at the deeper face // the starry freedom / written in the milky rivery line... (Taking the Print).

About this title

About the Author:

Ed Roberson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1939. He is author of several books of poetry, most recently THE NEW WING OF THE LABYRINTH (Singing Horse Press, 2009) and CITY ECLOGUE, (Atelos, 2006). His collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; his book Atmosphere Condition was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. He is a recipient of the Lila Wallace Writers' Award and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Covering work from Roberson's first book, 1970's When Thy King Is a Boy, to recent "work in progress," this volume, as its title suggests, progresses through several modes of poetic address. The early work, just pushing beyond modernism's statelier modes, contains such Prufrockian lines as "and in the countryside the circumstance/ adds a spoon of dull explosion to the tea." The middle work is spiritual in tone, and features iconic imagery and spell-like choruses: "turn ambiguity/ into separation/ separation into repetition/ repetition into chant/ turn/ turn" he writes in "Formula for the Poem Dance." Other poems are fragment laden and overly ambiguous. The later, more narrative poems are the most successful, putting careful sound-play and full sentences to uses suggesting the Williams of "Asphodel" in pacing his musings. "By The Rivers of..." is a historical phantasmagoria: "They live in/ a timeless solution of their histories/ the living broth of their other/ lives, their dead, their brothers/ I find/ something familial/ familiar in these small squares/ these boxes buried in the public air." What makes Roberson's project cohesive is a persistent belief in the reaches of the meditating mind coupled with a serious critique of political realities, qualities that link him to an important sub-tradition of African-American literature that includes Nathaniel Mackey and Will Alexander, and to the main project of Talisman House, which is to uncover and rediscover poets writing on the margins. Without question the epitome of the "outsider" poet, Roberson is well discovered, even as this book hints at better work to come.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Talisman House, Publishers
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1883689791
• ISBN 13: 9781883689797
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144