As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2020 - Softcover

Corey, Stephen

 
9781945680533: As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2020
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1945680539 ISBN 13: 9781945680533
Verlag: White Pine Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.

Stephen Corey’s work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone―all work to make this a truly important and memorable book.

“Here is a life, and a life, and / a life,” Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem’s instructions to on how find the faded leaf―also a metaphor for the end of life―that one must imagine still colored after he is “gone.” The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us “How we are growing undoes what we are” and see.
Like the glassblower’s art in one of these major poems, “Breath makes another world.” And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see “the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us.” And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art.”
―Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From

“Stephen Corey’s, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O’Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there’s also the dual elegy for the poet’s father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson ‘at the moment of his first masturbation,” and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into “the real world” ―keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter “playing Beethoven on my chest” ― the poems are informed by both of his masters… by the “shelves of books” that are “the bones of my brain.””
―Albert Goldbarth

Stephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow’s Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow’s Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

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Keep Talking

 

The thing worth saying once–say it again.

Learn to lead off with what little you know,

then fear no moment as the final one.

 

Electricity:  her hand to your skin.

Say yes, say hand, say tongue, never say no–

that thing worth saying once . . . say it again.

 

Electricity:  the chair you’re born in.

When pain rides win and place, then pain rides show

to cant each moment toward the final one.

 

Yes, let’s copy the yes of Molly Bloom.

Yes, let’s erase the alone of each no.

The thing once nearly said–say it this time.

 

One  no  be  on – all born of bone.  All bone

giving birth to and coming from marrow,

who’s naming which moment the final one?

 

Lean, arch, lift, writhe, groan, swell, rise, ooze, spurt, moan.

We want the electric, always, fast and slow.

The one thing never said–say it again,

as if the final moment were the one.

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Verlag
White Pine Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1945680539
ISBN 13 
9781945680533
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
230
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Verantwortliche Person
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