Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems

Rice, Stan

ISBN 10: 0679411453 / ISBN 13: 9780679411451

Published by Alfred a Knopf, 1992

About this Item

SINGING YET: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Stan Rice, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, stated first edition, inscribed by author on half-title page (November 1996), 1992. BOOK CONDITION: near fine. The text block is in fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. There is no bookplate nor signature of a prior owner. Not a library book nor remainder. The maroon cloth boards are in near fine condition (lower right corner bumped). The dust jacket is in near fine condition. 9 ½ x 6 ½, 226 pages, 18 ounces. XX [From the inner flaps] The fourth book, after a nine-year silence, from Stan Rice, whose third collection won the Academy of American Poets' Edgar Allan Poe Award acknowledging the continuing achievement of a poet under forty-five. SINGING YET provides an overview of Rice's work in generous selections from the three earlier books, together with a considerable body of new work that marks the poet's steady growth. Among the new poems: I Called the Cow I called the Cow/and she came to me,/black and brown, she bowed/her smooth blunt head, and said,/I am one of the dead,/who come and go like flowers,/who rarely speak your tongue,/and so you think us dumb/beasts, but we are not so,/we are trapped between death and life,/unable to want, or choose,/I have no dread, I have no name,/all my faces are the same/black or brown, with blaze,/I eat, I drink, I stand/in the shade of the one shade tree/and try, like fire, to think. XX Stan Rice was for many years associated with San Francisco State University, as Professor of English and Creative Writing, Assistant Director of The Poetry Center, and Chairman of the Creative Writing Department. In addition to the Edgar Allan Poe Award, he has received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He now lives in New Orleans.

Seller Inventory # 002331

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems
• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679411453
• ISBN 13: 9780679411451
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Weight: 18 ounces
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of new and previously published poems by the winner of the Academy of American Poets Edgar Allan Poe Award offers generous selections from the poet's three previous collections.

Reviews

Rice, a low-profile West Coast poet with three small-press books to his name, has now published this volume of new and selected poems with a major New York house. His first book in nine years, it may well expand the audience for his intense, painfully bright poems, which often recall Roethke: "Jane was my jam/ The movement of fish/ fleshed out her dress." While Rice often exhibits a dry wit, his work is dead serious. The bruised center of this collection is the death of a young daughter from leukemia, a loss that is dealt with directly in the selections from White Boy (Mudra, 1975) and Some Lamb (Figures, 1975) and that continues to surface in many later poems. Indeed, one sometimes fears that the poet's concentration was irrevocably shattered by the event. But in the newer poems--the quietly moving "Walking with My Son to the Creek in the Dark Which He Fears" or the coldy humorous "Icy Gravy" ("I have seen the ladle/ rise and fall/ from the icy cradle")--Rice seems to have marshaled his powers again. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib . , New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.