First Things When

Robert Rehder

ISBN 10: 1857549090 / ISBN 13: 9781857549096

Published by Carcanet Press Ltd, GB, 2009

About this Item

In "First Things When", Robert Rehder views the modern world - our world - with a cool wit. Insights deadly despite a self-deprecating ruefulness spark into view. Rehder's poems inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: supermarkets, airports and parking garages; the illusory communities of celebrity and the digital universe: 'Instead of friends you have email'. There everyone is on first-name terms - 'What are they trying to hide?' Rehder's humour acknowledges his complicity and skewers the fake and the absurd.The small Swiss village of Corminboeuf where the poet lives is both a comic and mythic location for a life. Throughout the collection, luminous, poignant poems return us to a larger world that sustains and, precariously, endures: the fading splendour of Venice, a culture we are in danger of discarding, and a series of poems on the mysterious, transforming power of snow. These are poems of everyday things, remembering and forgetting, movies, coffee mugs and the beauty of the natural world.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781857549096

Bibliographic Details

• Title: First Things When
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857549090
• ISBN 13: 9781857549096
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Firmly rooted in the modern world, with all the paraphernalia it entails, the poems of this collection are fascinated with life in the digital age and cut away at it with a razor wit while still finding unexpected beauty in the seemingly cold. From the invented locales of modern society such as supermarkets, airports, and parking garages to Hollywood action movies and classical music, these poems pick away at the wild side of human life and the strangeness of human behavior in a world that sustains and, precariously, endures.

About the Author

Robert Rehder has taught at Princeton University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Stirling, and the University of Fribourg. He is the author of Compromises Will Be Different.