Synopsis
The Sanity of Earth and Grass brings together over a hundred poems, thirty-one of them never before published, by a remarkable American poet.
A gregarious person who loved and celebrated human bonds, Winner also drew strength from nature, and his poems glow with sensual pleasure and confrontation. As he says in "On Lexington Avenue," "What I like is smell . . . the enormous kindness of sensation." At the same time, and without self-pity, he probes graphically and at unusual depth the violence, deprivation, and injustice that are part of so many lives.
Reviews
Like Wallace Stevens, poet Winner (1940-86) was a successful businessman. An accident at age 16, however, had left him a quadriplegic, and it is from this perspective that his finely tuned lyrics derive a uniquely affirmative approach to "the enormous kindness of sensation." Gathered here are the two collections published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of 28 unpublished pieces. Nearly all bear witness to the vexing dichotomies of daily life, "things and their stubborn purposes," to the growing conviction that "every day the impossible/seems more necessary." Winner's outspoken honesty often lends haunting force to deceptively modest poems about political ("The Health of the World") and social ("Into My Dream") matters, recalling the resonant self-appraisals of James Wright and the descriptive rigor of William Carlos Williams. Although it is a shame that Winner was not more widely known while he lived, this volume may become one of those "places where we first learned/dreams enlarged us." Recommended for all poetry collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This volume collects two previous collections, Green in the Body and Flogging the Czar, and 31 previously unpublished poems by the late Winner. In two very personal forewords, Thomas Lux and Jane Cooper remember Winner, quadriplegic from a diving accident since age 16, as brave, honest, tender, and funny. All these adjectives apply to his poetry. Each poem shows his love for language and sincere emotion. Writing of common things--his father working at an easel, rush-hour traffic, banjos, tugboats, photographs of dead relatives--he brings beauty to even the most mundane topic, a freshness that illuminates the familiar. He titled his poems elementally, to signal the core of his fascination--"Concentration Camp Numbers," "Times Square," "Recovery Room," and other well-known but rarely fully contemplated places and things. Many poems have a sentimental quality yet never slip into lugubrious reminiscing, turning instead to an intelligent, passionate perspective. Each line should be read slowly and often. Elizabeth Gunderson
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