The Sea of Tranquility - Softcover

Gordon, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915306794 ISBN 13: 9780915306794

Publisher: Curbstone Press, 1995

About this title

Review:

"...his poems about old age are like fierce beacons lighting the horizon." -- People's Daily World

"Don Gordon is one of the most overlooked poets of the twentieth century..." -- Bloomsbury Review

80
Black Hole
Childhood
Chosen People
Citizen Band
The City
Communique
The Distance To The Planets
In The Cell
In The Vanguard
Light
Lions
Los Desaparecidos
Minnows
The Missiles
The Mole
Neighborhood Watch
No One
On The Border
On The Mesa
The Scientist
The Sea Of Tranquility
Someone Has Heard
The Tears
The Theory
There Were No People
To The Survivors
Waiting
The Widows
Words And Music
Worlds
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Survival is not enough for Don Gordon, a neglected poet of our era who writes poems of age's hard wisdom: "Me child is welling up in me, / A terrible fountain of bones." Older blood brother of Wendell Berry, Gordon's poems arise out of a concem for a land and people that nourished his eighty-seven years in a world that now seems fallen away into "nightmare cliffs," materialism, and confusion: "Talk now on this frequency before they jam it. Find out: why everything crawls into dark culverts, There are no lights on the plain." Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1902, now a resident of Los Angeles and author of five previous books of poetry, Gordon, according to Thomas McGrath, "is one of the very best of revolutionary poets." Unmythical and outspoken, these candid poems are disarmingly directed at the nerve centers of our national psyche. A twentieth-century poet-prophet, Gordon believes in the civic and moral duty of a poet "to invent a sea of tranquility / in the heartland." Things matter to him as they did to Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson. His work has the gentleness of an eighteenth-century house and the toughness of an M-16. Despite the semi-apocalyptic edge to his vision, "The Sea of Tranquility" discloses a sad, upbeat blossoming, a twilight mood not unlike King Lear watching Cordelia die. -- From Independent Publisher

From Publishers Weekly:

Gordon's ( Excavations ) sixth collection is concerned with cultural morality: society's acknowledgment or abdication of its responsibility to values. The paradox of the book's title is metaphorically realized in these prosaic, imagistically simple poems. Yet, their modest construction does not conceal Gordon's ethical outrage and raw emotion that is ultimately determined to drown out social apathy, alienation and renunciation of ideals. The central tension here lies in the poet's desire to observe culture in a detached manner, on the one hand, and his responsiveness on the other. When Gordon affects the stance of impassive sage, his vision seems less honest, his ideas facile: "Everyone is waiting /For the messiah, / Or the millennium, / Or the missiles." However, when he does reveal his emotional involvement in those issues that comprise his work, Gordon demonstrates his ability to express movingly both the politics, and the mystery, of commitment.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0915306794
• ISBN 13: 9780915306794
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 41