The Apparitioners - Hardcover

Witte, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0976047012 ISBN 13: 9780976047018

Publisher: Orchises Press, 2005

Synopsis

The poems of The Apparitioners explore the boundaries between us and the world we have colonized, where we find ourselves unsettled by some mystery that cannot be owned. A father tries to calm his daughter, who is troubled by night visitors after a schoolmate is carried away. Having purchased his ideal home in a planned development, a man confronts past ghosts and his own doubts about belonging. And a woman nearly killed by stroke struggles to recover her place in her family and community, but finds welcome from a surprising host. Longer narratives alternate with lyrics that through close observation seek out the natural world, a presence that on occasion offers us a glimpse of purpose. Moving between poles of assurance and unease, secrecy and revelation, The Apparitioners is a noteworthy debut.

About this title

About the Author

George Witte is the author of four collections of poems: An Abundance of Caution, Does She Have a Name?, Deniability, and The Apparitioners.  His poems have been published in a range of journals and anthologized in The Best American Poetry, Old Flame, Rabbit Ears, and The Doll Collection.  He received Poetry magazine's Frederick Bock prize, as well as a fellowship from the New Jersey Council for the Arts.  The editor in chief of St. Martin's Press, he lives with his family in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

Reviews

Set among suburban homes and in neighboring forests and fields, Witte's descriptive verse, seasonal lyric and short narrative poems arrive in sonnets, in all manner of rhyming stanzas and in meticulous free verse. This debut collection describes the "Frail correspondences/ Required of mass and air/ To lift the hawk" into flight; treats the fears of parents in "cul-de-sacs"; considers October sparrows in "fall's/ false spring"; and compares the speaker and his friends to fireflies, who "pass in time from form to form,/ containers for a glow not ours." Witte's interest in casual American speech, and some of his Northeastern landscapes, suggest Robert Frost, while the austerity of his diction, and his more than passing interest in mortality, imply lessons learned from Anthony Hecht. His search for human lesson in gardens and fields, and his attraction to green retreats, even suggests Frost's sometime model Horace, who propounded worldly wisdom from his Sabine farm. Witte, who is editor-in-chief of St. Martin's Press, concludes with a dramatic monologue, written in the voice of a woman recovering (slowly) from a stroke; it wings slowly from urgent pathos to a kind of bitter resignation, and works to balance the more contented voices that carry the shorter poems. The calm fortitude the latter display suggest work of long planning and considered judgment: Horace himself might approve. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Orchises Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0976047012
• ISBN 13: 9780976047018
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 86