Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom : The First Five Books - The Storm and Other Poems, Striking the Dark Air for Music, Reasons for Going It on Foot, Invisible Guests, In the World's Common Grasses

Root, William Pitt

ISBN 10: 1881090124 / ISBN 13: 9781881090120

Published by Confluence Press, Lewiston, 1994

About this Item

FIRST PRINTING of the First Edition. A fine collection of 250 of the author's poems, selected and thematically re-organized from the poet's highly acclaimed first five books, evoking landscapes and heartscapes of a deeply personal and moving form and power. Hardcover with dust jacket, contains a key to poetic forms, indexed, 277pp., book shows some moisture staining to top, moisture staining also to jacket reverse. Jacket is neatly encased in an acid-free archival plastic protector. Very rare. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 00013182

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom : The First Five Books - The Storm and Other Poems, Striking the Dark Air for Music, Reasons for Going It on Foot, Invisible Guests, In the World's Common Grasses
• Publisher: Confluence Press, Lewiston
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1881090124
• ISBN 13: 9781881090120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition (stated).
• Condition: Very Good-
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good-
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature

About this title

Synopsis

This volume collects approximately 250 poems, selected and thematically reorganized from the poet's highly acclaimed first five books. Here are poems evoking landscapes from the Gulf of Mexico to La Push, heartscapes inhabited by day-laborers, waitresses, bikers,rioters, philologists, weight-lifters and magicians (men and women old and young, black, white, Native American); and here too are evocations exploring what's it's like to have been a son, and to be a father. All are performed on a keyboard ranging from the resonant bass notes of despair to the ringing upper registers of ecstasy and uncut joy. Whether Root is writing deeply personal or mythic poems, what emerges from the collection, whole and entire, has all the power, daring and beauty of an individual vision.

Reviews

This volume represents almost 250 poems from Root's first five books. Although their subjects vary widely, the poems are united by acute observation of and deep compassion for the world and its inhabitants. Root plunges headlong into sad events, such as the death of his father, finding beauty even in the darkness: of holding his mother's hand as a small boy at the funeral, he says, "Her grip tightened / and trembled as her rings cut our flesh / and blood came to the edges / of the stones." With gentle power, Root shows us the simple grace of the kind of minute details that surround us all. Elizabeth Gunderson