Thread

Thread presents eighty-six new poems by “the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (The Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Wallace Stevens Award citation).

Michael Palmer’s new collection is structured in two parts, “What I Did Not Say” and “Thread,” subtitled “Stanzas in Counterlight.” It begins with a beautiful suite of poems featuring The Master of Shadows (first glimpsed in his 2006 collection The Company of Moths). The counterlight of the title section shines in shafts of Palmer’s ever-surprising ironic wit, which is given to sidelong parallel leaps. Several poems in Thread directly address our endless wars, yet even in sorrow and rage the poems still glow with wonder. In multiphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are grounded in the central rootedness of the whole history of poetry and culture that has gone before. In his new poems, signature palimpsests create complex cycles of thought, “returning and returning” via echoes to what he has called “the layering process, the process of accretion and the process of emergence.”

      Say / that whatever comes / goes. / /
      The Shadow knows / nothing / such / /
      His calling. / Round his / listing / /
      House / the bindweed / grows.

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969.  He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and he was awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.