West of Yesterday, East of Summer - Hardcover

Monette, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031211379X ISBN 13: 9780312113797

Publisher: St. Martins Press, 1994

Synopsis

A selection of poems from a respected poet, written between 1973 and 1993, displays his wide-ranging passions and insights, showing his diversity in their movement from the sublime to the heroic and featuring the poet's reflective notes on the works.

About this title

Review:

Paul Monette began his writing life as a poet. For ten years he worked exclusively in the genre producing The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975) and No Witnesses (1981). Monette then turned to writing novels and did not return to poetry until almost a decade later, when AIDS cut down his lover, Roger Horwitz. Sporadically during Roger's 20-month illness, Monette began to experiment with a form that would express the careening anxiety and the overwhelming sense of exile that had engulfed the two men. After Robert died in 1986, Monette wrote a stunning series of elegies for his friend, a monumental and wholly original effusion of the fury and madness of grief. Those elegies appeared in Love Alone (1988), garnering awards and changing the face of AIDS in literature. Since then he has written a varied group of poems, some more formal, some in a torrent of language reminiscent of Love Alone. In West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems 1973-1993, this impressive body of work has been brought together to reveal the extraordinary diversity of his career as a poet, from the sublime to the heroic. Monette has provided notes and reflections to place the work in context, as well as an illuminating preface. -- Midwest Book Review

From Library Journal:

Since 1988 the work of novelist, essayist, memoirist (whose autobiographical Becoming a Man garnered a National Book Award), and poet Monette has grown out of his experience of AIDS. Not surprisingly, the strongest works in this selection of recent and previously published poetry are Monette's seven elegies for his dead lover, chosen from Love Alone (LJ 4/1/88). Otherwise, it is hard to quarrel when Monette characterizes the early pieces included here as "a numbing round of obfuscation and cliche." And the recent poems tend to read like prolix free association rants self-consciously yet unevocatively invoking the late (ragin') Yeats. If you haven't already purchased Love Alone, consider doing so: it speaks to an audience beyond the usual poetry readership. Buy the current volume if your Monette collection needs rounding out.
Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martins Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 031211379X
• ISBN 13: 9780312113797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 103