Cairo Traffic (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Schwartz, Professor Lloyd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226741931 ISBN 13: 9780226741932

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Synopsis

In Cairo Traffic, his third book of poems, Lloyd Schwartz asks the Sphinx to explain the riddle "about, you know, / Time and Power and Families-the one you think you / have the answer to. Tell me your answer! / No . . . don't." The search for answers takes the poet to some surprising, often phantasmagoric places, and back again to the self, to dreams, to home, and even to the nursing home where his mother-sphinxlike herself-becomes the person asking the dark questions and providing some unexpected answers. These extraordinary narratives-funny and frightening, seductive and profoundly moving-explore the intersections of character and language, the places where common speech mysteriously transforms itself into poetry. This book, which includes several translations of contemporary Brazilian poems, confirms Schwartz's growing reputation as an intensely compelling and original poet.

About this title

From the Author:

I think Cairo Traffic is a very unusal book of poems, even a strange book. It brings together sad poems about an aging parent in a nursing home with nightmarish poems about dreams and sexuality, comic poems about language (or the misuse of language) in contemporayr America ("I know this town like the back of my head") with more mysterious poems about Brazil (including several translations of contemporayr Brazilian poetry), the Middle East, and turn-of-the-century Russia. As I hope the title suggests, I see the world as a kind of traffic jam--funny and poignant, formal and colloquial, even verse and prose--speaking voices in continual collision, or at least intersection. At one point I ask the Sphinx the answer to the large riddles of life, including why we're all stuck--from the time we're born till the time we grow old and die--with a human body. Then I don't want to hear the answer. Only we ourselves can solve the riddles and contradictions of our lives.

About the Author:

Lloyd Schwartz is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the commentator on classical music and the visual arts for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and a noted Elizabeth Bishop scholar. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0226741931
• ISBN 13: 9780226741932
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 93