Famous Persons We Have Known: Poems

Robbins, Richard

ISBN 10: 0910055661 / ISBN 13: 9780910055666

Published by Eastern Washington University Press, Spokane, WA, 2000

About this Item

Very gently bumped. Inscribed on the title page "For Billy - Best of luck in your own writing. Richard Robbins, Bemidji. 10/31/2000.". Seller Inventory # 200423

Bibliographic Details

Title: Famous Persons We Have Known: Poems

Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press, Spokane, WA

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

Signed: Inscribed By the Author

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

In this collection of poems we indeed meet the famous persons promised in the title: Lon Chaney, Jr. buying eggs and bananas at a Capistrano Beach supermarket; Elvis "slipping out / with raccoons and owls to buy pink / Cadillacs for anyone that moved him;" Marshal Dillon, his head split by a surfing mishap; even Geronimo, galloping back toward nature, "ruined for love." But this books is about more than famous people. From the car and kokanee-chocked waters of Montana to an art gallery in Utah where the narrator doesn't meet a famous poet laureate, Robbins traces his own heritage and ours by connecting past and present, the dead and living. He does so with sly humor, a naturalist's precision, and a potent lyricism. The cumulative effect is that of a building rhythm that echoes our own trembling relationship to the land that somehow sustains us―"because," as the narrator says in "Bread," the collection's final poem, "feeding / the hungry is what it's always all about."

About the Author:

RICHARD ROBBINS grew up in California and Montana. His first collection, The Invisible Wedding, was published in 1984. Over the years, Robbins has received awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, the McKnight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently directs the creative writing program and the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University, and lives in Mankato with his wife, the poet Candace Black, and their two sons.