Present - Hardcover

Corn, Alfred

4

8 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1887178317 ISBN 13: 9781887178310

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1997

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A collection of twenty-four poems that range from comic to classical, with one prose piece, "A Goya Reproduction," in which the author remembers how a library book introduced him to fine art

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Review:

Richard Howard, one of our most difficult to please literary critics, writes that Alfred Corn's poetry is accessible and bold, without simplification. It is, he goes on to say, "The gossip of the gods!" In "Parallels," Corn imagines two mirrors facing one another: "Each, in mirroring mirroring in each, / Reflects contrary counterfeits of truth, / A glass-green emptiness in shrinking frames. / Contempt? It's nothing but reversed self-loathing. / Imagine, instead, an act of conciliation, / Someone recalling how much there was to praise." The richness of the image (I've been mulling it over for a while now) and all that it suggests about projections and reflections, typifies Corn's subtle sophistication. "A Marriage in the Nineties" is funny and tender, "After Neruda" is elemental and vivid, and "Stepson Elegy" is beautiful in its honest, halting way.

Review:

Present is Alfred Corn's seventh collection of poems. Eminently cosmopolitan, he is a stylist of the first order, both inverse and in prose (he has just this year published a manual of prosody, The Poem's Heartbeat, as well as a novel about AIDS entitled Part of His Story).... At the center of the present volume ... is a suite of poems and prose pieces called "Musical Sacrifice" (one possible translation of J.S. Bach's title "Musikalisches Opfer"); in it, Bach and Franz Kafka are considered at length and shown--subtly but convincingly--not only to be driven by the same spiritual and esthetic forces but also to affect us, as readers or listeners, in similar ways. -- The New York Times Book Review, William Ferguson

After Neruda
The Alfama
The Bonfire
Caesarea
Choreography: 1. Balanchine's Western Symphony
Choreography: 2. Mikhail Baryshnikov Dances Three Preludes
The Cloak Of Invisibility
A Conch From Sicily
The Dead Sea
A Goya Reproduction
In Safed
Insertion Arias
Jaffa
Lago Di Coome: The Cypresses
Little Erie Railroad
A Mariage In The Nineties
Maui: Concerto For Island And Developer
Michel Gerard's Observatory
Musical Sacrifice: 1
Musical Sacrifice: 10
Musical Sacrifice: 11. A Sacrifice For Sans Souci
Musical Sacrifice: 12
Musical Sacrifice: 13. Die Verwandlung
Musical Sacrifice: 14. J.s.b. Dictates His Last Work From The Deathbed
Musical Sacrifice: 2
Musical Sacrifice: 3
Musical Sacrifice: 4. F.k. At Lugano (1911)
Musical Sacrifice: 5. 1722: Anna Magdalena's Little Clavier Book
Musical Sacrifice: 6
Musical Sacrifice: 7. 1913: F.k. Publishes His First Book
Musical Sacrifice: 8. 1723: Johannes-passion In Leipzig
Musical Sacrifice: 9. 1917: The Onset
Parrallels
Philosophy
A Poem Named 'basho In The Genju Hut'
The Shouters
Stepson Elegy
Sugar Cane
Two Greek Subjects: 1. Sapphics At A Trot
Two Greek Subjects: 2. To Hermes
The Unknown Poets: 1
The Unknown Poets: 2
The Unknown Poets: 3
Water Like A Philosopher's Stone
Wonderbread
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder�

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