描述
开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 精装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780547232744
THE GREAT WAVE, Slate’s follow-up collection to THE INCENTIVE
OF THE MAGGOT, is a more personal performance than his much lauded
and talked about debut book, which was nominated for the National
Book Critics Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Lenore
Marshall Prize, and was the winner of the prestigious Larry Levis
Poetry Prize. While Slate’s first book burst forth from a
twenty-year period of silence, THE GREAT WAVE bears the mark of a
finely honed fluency and makes good his exceptional promise. While
Slate occasionally returns to his experience as an international
businessman (“Meeting in Madrid”, “Samba de Orfeo”, and “Reunion”),
his most powerful and moving poems revivify childhood memories
(‘Four Roses”) or address the condition of his elderly parents
(“December First, Terminal”). One of the most haunting and poignant
poems recounts the tragedy of the 1942 Coconut Grove fire in which
Slate’s fraternal grandmother died “with her sister in the ladies’
room.” Of this event, Slate writes, “My life began with the fire, /
glimmering in the birth waters. / Beyond my bedroom wall/voices
murmured a memory.” “Coconut Grove” is one of several poems that
mention historical catastrophes such as fires and floods and these
allusions shock us with recognition of our own perilous and tenuous
and terror-ridden times. Everywhere, the collection displays
Slate’s sly and signature wit as in a marvelously humorous and
historically accurate “Khrushchev’s Foot,” in which Slate reminds
us of the time Khrushchev slammed his shoe in anger on a desk at
the UN. Out of this event, he imagines, “Such a delicate foot,
veined and moist–/it makes me want to reveal a secret, / an
expendable on, declassified.” Reading THE GREAT WAVE, we are
reminded that the purpose of poetry is to confront the urgencies of
the present by remembering and reinventing the past.
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