Dumb Luck: Poems

Hamill, Sam

ISBN 10: 1929918259 / ISBN 13: 9781929918256

Published by Consortium Book Sales & Dist, 2002

About this Item

May have light to moderate shelf wear and/or a remainder mark. Complete. Clean pages.

Seller Inventory # 1494005

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dumb Luck: Poems
• Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Dist
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1929918259
• ISBN 13: 9781929918256
• Binding: paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Influenced by the Chinese and Japanese masters, Hamill’s Dumb Luck affirms his ability to give us back the world and all its vicissitudes. Here you will find Zen fables, elegies and haiku, bluesy riffs, and poems that celebrate births, marriages, the liberating exile of the poet, as well as verses that present the dumb luck that has peppered the poet’s life.

Sam Hamill is the author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, as well as three collections of essays. He is the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and contributing editor at The American Poetry Review.

Reviews

Hamill has been deservedly praised for founding Copper Canyon Press, that excellent poetry publisher, and translating a lot of classical Greek, Chinese, and Japanese poetry and Taoist philosophy into vivid American English. His original poetry has been less acclaimed but shouldn't be ignored. Parts 1, 3, and 4 in this book show him in three different metiers--as a scholar of Far Eastern literature, as a late-middle-aged man, and as a person in the midst of life, surveying his past and hailing others' futures (e.g., in several wedding poems). Of course, his three spheres of activity overlap, and the wisdom of great Taoist, Confucian, and Zen masters crops up throughout the book, as do consciousness of his age and incidents from his particular life. Part 2 includes translations of the twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist nature poet Saigyo Hosho and two original haiku. Distinguishing everything here are a diction and a style that are utterly relaxed and companionable--like a brook trickling through a Buddhist garden, and just as restorative. Ray Olson
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