War bird
By: David Gewanter.
Series: Phoenix poets; Phoenix poets
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 73
ISBN-13: 9780226289786
Description: From "Three at 4:43"And here comes my friend, limping onhis heavy boot, the heel come off. A cobbler's shopappears, and I buy the black nails, the dwarf's hammer, glue and strapping. I work hard on it, bending thereuntil he speaks and walks on.But as he is dead, his voice and stepmake no sound. In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies--all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. "War Bird" gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in "1861," our "hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year."
Notes: Poetry.

Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: The old parables; title: Day book; title: In again out again; title: Body text; title: Hamlet of Merano: the lotus eaters; title: Break-up café; title: Baudelaire's day book; title: Desaparecidos; title: The Giant's Causeway; title: Book of the blurbers; title: Three at 4:43; title: The battery; title: American incognito; title: Jacopone pietà: justice; title: American incognito; title: Pediment; title: Michaelangelo: three poems in black; title: Mistress Umlaut; title: Möbius; title: Surrey: walled garden; title: Against the grain; title: Cook at Maui; title: War bird; title: War bird: a journal.