Duties of an English Foreign Secretary - Softcover

Card, Macgregor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934200298 ISBN 13: 9781934200292

Publisher: Fence Books, 2009

Synopsis

Winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series selected by Martin Corless-Smith. When do "hermit" and "maudit" not rhyme? When you're a fellow traveler in Macgregor Card's global community of canny songsters. These poems are inexhaustibly sophisticated, a songbook of meditations on hospitality, fidelity, friendship, regret and the lyric. Here the song drives the engine and finds brilliant solutions.

About this title

About the Author:

Macgregor Card is a poet and bibliographer living in Brooklyn. He was co-editor of The Germ. He is co-editing an anthology of the New York School. Recent poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, AUFGABE, The Recluse, KGB Lit, FENCE and Best American Poetry.

From Publishers Weekly:

The speaker of Card's debut is a man at war with the shortness of his attention span: How long is the comedy/ about me? he asks. Yet Card is less interested in answering questions than in changing the subject. There was a ship on fire last night, begins the opening poem. I am ashamed and a burden to my friends. This can be frustrating, but when he allows us to follow the faint strands of logic in his language, as though following a thread through a hedge maze, Card's voice triumphs over its attention deficiency: I need for you to wreck/ upon yourself// the salvage you recover/ from me. Card falters when he abandons this thread altogether, as if to suggest his bombastic speaker and his language alone were fraught with confidence the poems themselves need not surpass. Nevertheless, Card's strange and embattled voice works upon the ear long after the book is shut, and the originality of this debut is such that we might not yet know how to understand the operations of such a well-built yet brittle verbal machine. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1934200298
• ISBN 13: 9781934200292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 107