The Determined Days (Sewanee Writers' Series) - Hardcover

Stephens, Philip

 
9781585670147: The Determined Days (Sewanee Writers' Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1585670146 ISBN 13: 9781585670147
Verlag: Overlook Books, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A remarkable debut collection of poems in the tradition of Browning and Frost

The latest in the Sewanee Writer's Series published by the Overlook Press, Philip Stephens's The Determined Days presents far-ranging urban and rural locales in the Midwest, the Ozarks, and northern California. In each of these bleak landscapes, Stephens introduces us to a host of unforgettable characters: a former gravedigger who believes ghosts stole his first-born; a young couple forced to stay the night at a motel run by a pornography-watching desk clerk; a woman haunted by a headless deer; a gang of railroad signalmen who get through their exhausting workdays by telling stories, arguing, and vying for what power they can gain in an indifferent world.

Throughout this stunning collection, characters tell tales to bring order to their disappointing and already-determined days. Ironic, sometimes tragic, and always provocative, The Determined Days is a startling reevaluation of the ideas of labor, life, and relationships--as well as the expectations of contemporary American poetry.

"These vigorous, sometimes brutal, poems are famillialy related as well as indebted to Frost's blank verse.... Read as a whole--as they should be--the cumulative effect of this truly accomplished collections is powerful, disturbing, and authoritative. I am filled with admiration for Mr. Stephens's work."--Anthony Hecht

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Philip Stephens was educated at the University of Missouri-Columbia, John Hopkins University, and the University of California-Irvine. His writing has appeared in Agni, Southwest Review, The North American Review, and The Oxford American, among other publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Rezensionen

Frost is apparently Stephens' master, for here are dialogues, narratives, and first-person reports, not necessarily of Stephens' own experiences, in shapely, conversational blank verse or, in the book's first and last poems, in iambic pentameter couplets with minimal imperfect rhyming. The subjects are Frostlike, and Wordsworthlike, too: events in the lives of people who work, get drunk, go a little crazy (with good reason), have odd encounters, and try to be friendly. Stephens' people are, however, less of Frost's world than of Philip Levine's: men doing dirty labor, social work, old-fashioned newsroom duty, and white-collar grunt jobs. Stephens has a realist fiction writer's flair for scene, speech, and character, and the incidents in his poems are as all-too-humanly true as those in a good John O'Hara short story. In poems like "Human Resources," in which the recently divorced narrator is egged into "hitting on" a woman in a bar, Stephens honors all his possible influences. He repeats the feat in virtually every poem in an excellent first collection. Ray Olson

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Overlook Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1585670146
ISBN 13 
9781585670147
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
126
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar