Haywire: Poems (Swenson Poetry Award) - Softcover

Bilgere, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874216478 ISBN 13: 9780874216479

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human condition in accessible lines and a magician's way with language. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy

Haywire was chosen for the Swenson Award by poet Edward Field, winner of numerous awards and a personal friend of the late May Swenson. Field describes the book this way. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn’t fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy."

About this title

About the Author:

George Bilgere has published three earlier books of poetry, The Going, Big Bang, and The Good Kiss. The Going (1995) received the Devins Award, honoring an outstanding first book of poetry. In 2002, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose The Good Kiss as the winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and also awarded Bilgere, along with Katya Kapovich, the 2002 Witter Bynner Fellowship. Bilgere’s poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. He has received grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. New work is forthcoming in Poetry, Field, Denver Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where he teaches at John Carroll University.

Review:

George Bilgere is a smooth-talking poet whose ease of language can lead us unawares into a complex terrain of the heart and spirit. Haywire is full of bittersweet poems that are balanced between humor and seriousness, between the sadness of loss and the joy of being alive to experience it.

Whenever a parade of Bilgere poems goes by, I’ll be there waving my little flag.

Billy Collins, formerly U.S. Poet Laureate

This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn’t fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy. . . . Coming from one of the ethnic, industrial cities, his work has a gritty element. He recalls all the sorrows of a life—the drunken father, the parents’ divorce, his mother’s death, his unremitting horniness, his own divorce—nothing special, just what we all have to deal with one way or another. And yet he ends on an almost contented note. Haywire is remarkable for being an essentially happy book, though with an ironic eye cast on such happiness while children are starving. And when he arrives at this, we’re glad for him.

Edward Field, Judge of the 2006 Swenson Award

About this edition

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0874216478
• ISBN 13: 9780874216479
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 76