Glassworks (Pitt Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Wojahn, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822935538 ISBN 13: 9780822935537

Publisher: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 1987

Synopsis

Glassworks continues to explore concerns expressed in Wojahn's first book, Icehouse Lights. The tone of many of the poems is elegiac, and the poems are constructed to present an argument with memory, an investigation of the meaning of the past. They create a landscape where the past of the speaker merges with the lives of family members, lovers, and figures as diverse as Mark Rothko, Pablo Neruda, Wilhelm Reich, and the rock singer Jim Morrison.

About this title

About the Author

David Wojahn is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Poet's Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Reviews

Wojahn's Icehouse Lights ( LJ 4/1/82) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize; in Glassworks , he continues to explore the past, his own and others', through old photos, anniversaries, art, memory"the postures of solitude." Wojahn delineates his world into those who "believe in words" and those who prefer silence; into one's life and one's perception of it. His best poems "evoke . . . / words beyond the absence of words." Yet, while memory might be transformed ("how the smallest detail/ changes memory to distance"), his feelings and voice can also be remote and uncompelling. What further undercuts is a tendency to assume a presumptuous tone: "because today/ I am far from your death, let me/ be far from my own." This is disappointing and detracts from the intelligence and ambition throughout the collection. Robert Hudzik, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822935538
• ISBN 13: 9780822935537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80