9780896726055

The Clearing

Format: Hardcover

ISBN13: 9780896726055

Hardcover|9780896726055


Overview

Revolving around the deaths of the poet?s parents and first wife, The Clearing is a sustained meditation on the nature of love and its transformations. Perpetually dissatisfied with memory and what one poem calls ?the falsehoods about death? we tell ourselves, White?s poems turn on emotional openness and probing inquiry.?How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain?s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don?t come back. After such knowledge, he then recognizes that ?mind-changing sorrow dribbles away.? His poems record irreplaceable loss, and they also represent one man?s resilience and his ability to feel and love again. The Clearing is a very promising debut.? ?Willard Spiegelman?Philip White?s remarkable sequence conveys with great force the emptying of self and world through the loss of a sustaining love, and the grim, gradual outliving of that state. Though anything but metronomic, his poems have a versatile formal strength, and can, for instance, make use at moments of the sonnet?s structure. Even when confronting a world void of meaning, White has an admirable descriptive power, and nothing could be more vivid than these graveside lines from ?East Lawn?:?First the flowers were thrown,then the earth. I remember the rich incrementaldark by shovelful smothering their flaming colorslike a cloudbank slowly blotting out stars.?Richard Wilbur

ISBN-13

9780896726055

ISBN-10

0896726053

Weight

0.67 Pounds

Dimensions

9.25 x 0.56 x 6.45 In

List Price

$18.95

Format

Hardcover

Language

English

Pages

88 pages

Publisher

Texas Tech University Press

Published On

2007-04-15



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Bonita
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Santa Clarita, CA, USA

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$61.52

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