Singularity: Poems - Softcover

Glazner, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393318087 ISBN 13: 9780393318081

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

Synopsis

"[Glazner] manages to locate a redemptive grace in this world while writing from the very thick of it."―Santa Fe New Mexican

Greg Glazner's lyrical and meditative poems address the burdens, demands, and joys of life at the end of the twentieth century. Their subjects range from a self-portrait distorted by nightfall to a consideration of the place of consciousness in a universe created out of an explosion. These elegant, well-crafted poems depict the spiritual desolation of American life and act as beacons of hope in the quest for sincerity and depth.

About this title

About the Author:

Greg Glazner lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches at the College of Santa Fe. His first book, From the Iron Chair, won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

At the heart of Glazner's poetry lies an effort to take pieces of language from marketing lingo, academese and technobabble and recombine them into something meaningfully whole. Glazner (whose first collection, From the Iron Chair, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1991) works often with "words made of smoke," the matter of the "unreadable, four-color features" on the back of a businessman's newspaper. Brand names occupy a stratum of his consciousness: "But driving, I'd meet the usual lane of grimaces/ remembering what I was, and the signs/ would have me, Firestone, Sun West,/ Tastee Freeze." But he consistently resists the deadening force of this "show of gloss": "It's only dailiness./ It's just the way the hours go, numbed/ and building up, the way one trickle/ from the eaves has gone on/ freezing itself back for days." There is a kind of pedantic romanticism suggested in these poems, along with discouragement. Behind the television gaze of late-20th century life is a focus on a condition he observes in a college student he meets: an "almost invisible implosion of suffering." By paying intelligent attention to his surroundings, Glazner successfully converts the dross of the quotidian, including the media, into poetry. He asks: "Isn't it all TV by now,/ the world made over as a thing/ you can eat with your eyes, calling you/ to the channel selector, the Heineken,/ the sweet, hard wax for your car?" Glazner's response is to write poems you can eat with your mind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393318087
• ISBN 13: 9780393318081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94