No Second Eden: Poems - Hardcover

Cassity, Turner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804010501 ISBN 13: 9780804010504

Publisher: Swallow Press, 2002

Synopsis

If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.

Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state. Its chilly and amusing precision is about as far from Southern Gothic as you can get, although elsewhere there are faint hints of a failed Good Ole Boy. Indeed, the final poems in the collection are a bit more personal than one expects of this writer.

As rigorous in form as they are in feeling, the poems of No Second Eden are not for those with preconceived ideas of poetry or its purpose. Early in Cassity's career, James Merrill described Cassity's work as “an opera house in the jungle.” True so far as it goes, but he might also have called it the jungle in the opera house: a glimpse at the savagery behind every façade.

About this title

About the Author:

Turner Cassity was born in 1929 in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. He retired in 1991 as a catalog librarian at the R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

From Booklist:

Poetry isn't much thought of as a participatory art form, but it is, as critical discussion of voice and tone, which the reader must conjure up, implicates. Form may also ask for participation. Tight metrical and rhyme schemes can require poets to pare language to the bone, and readers to determine the precise meanings of words and syntactical tactics. In poem after poem, Cassity disciplines himself to form, and those who would read him with real comprehension may find immediate rereading necessary--and ever so rewarding. For Cassity regards everything with a cool, dissecting eye, and he exercises verbal and rational cleverness. He brooks no pretension and no romanticizing, even in himself. He well knows what would have happened to Rimbaud had he settled down (see "Boxcar Arthur, the Sequel"). He cuts the crap out of a shopworn parable (see "In the Receiving Line"), out of revolutionary cant (see "Karl and Julius and Gregory; or, Are You a Fructidor?"), and, breathtakingly, out of pseudopatriotic piety (see "WTC"). He is a national treasure. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0804010501
• ISBN 13: 9780804010504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80