10 commandments
Subtitle: poems
By: by J.D. McClatchy.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 104
Other titles: Ten commandments
Description: "Ten Commandments is a book-length sequence of poems that plot the rules we were raised on, rules we forget but can't evade. Here is the whole underworld of desire, its tasks and perversions. Here are the iron laws and the way the heart is shaped by them, even as it prefers betrayal, adultery, murder, or greed. J. D. McClatchy draws on intimate autobiographical details, and on a range of historical incidents that includes an eerie account of Proust in a brothel and a chilling glimpse of Eichmann in Argentina. Sideshow freaks, snipers in Vietnam, Auden's dictionary, whirling dervishes, motel and mammogram, slave and saint - this book is a cabinet of moral curiosities, a collage of emotional astonishments."--BOOK JACKET.