From the Iron Chair: Poems - Hardcover

Glazner, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393030989 ISBN 13: 9780393030983

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1992

Synopsis

This first book of poems was chosen by Charles Wright as the winner of the 1991 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Of his work Greg Glazner has written: "My poems often take as their starting points the landscape of the West--at times immense and impersonal, and at times a ground for human conflict. The sources are various: Texas farm life, suburban aspirations, television, Baptist oratory, northern New Mexico, the Montana wildernesses. But I hope that, finally, my work is about themes: living in the face of death, of violence, of bitterness, and finding a way to praise that living without looking away from its real terms."
There's great passion in Greg Glazner's thoughtful meditations, passion for language, for memory, for humanity and the natural world. It is a verse rich in music and emotional layerings from a voice that gives us the strength to ask ourselves "what we might be able, after all, to endure/among the ordinary blooms, dissolutions,/the frantic pleasures & denials,/the iron & hallucinatory beauty of our days."

About this title

Reviews

In this promising first book, winner of the 1991 Walt Whitman Award, Glazner assesses the complexities of loss. In meditative poems where nature anchors what we know of reality, he suggests that life's meaning exists to link memory with perception. A solitude evoked by the landscapes of Texas and the American West works its way into some of the poems. In others, insight is instead set against a social landscape: "I let the ghostly / starlight-whitened dust of exploded rooms / shine onto me like any other / blameless thing." Glazner turns to nature or the spiritual realm to find terms of praise, asking, in "The Metaphysician's Weekend," "Are we the heirs / the old ones built for, tiny and alive, / our breath rising into a hull / of symbols?" Where the poet falters, his language fails to carry freshness or edge--as when, in an untitled work, "the silences at night/ pressed like faceless presences against the windows." But with Glazner, faltering is rare.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

To read this book is to enter into an astonishing music and flow of images. Things seen--"A blackened match/ washes up to the dock, clings there"--give the reader bearings in a poetry that might otherwise be overpowering. This poetry sounds good even when you do feel a little lost in it. Major themes--the natural history of the American Southwest and the influence of Hispanic culture there, as well as glimpses into Texas high school football games and factory night shifts--are subsumed by the powerful rhythms of the verse. This is a poet whose observation of men "sledgehammering the nineteenth-century adobe/ledges off the balcony next door" leads to a reflection on Navajo prayer, Spanish crucifixes, and the nature of thought itself. A heady ride, well worth taking.
- Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393030989
• ISBN 13: 9780393030983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84