William Henry Harrison and Other Poems - Softcover

Slavitt, David R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807131210 ISBN 13: 9780807131213

Publisher: LSU Press, 2006

Synopsis

The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around― “With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she’s really angry”―but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the practice of buying, writing, and sending souvenir postcards. In between this pair, there are shorter pieces impressive in their range and tone and theme (be sure to read “Poem without Even One Word”) that dazzle in an already glittering body of work.

Slavitt’s poems can be playful, even silly, and then astonishingly convert levity into earnest urgency. Dark lines glint with the light of intelligence and mirth, even as artful puns and jokes reveal a rueful aspect. The poet gets older but his work is as graceful as ever, the lovable little boy signaling from inside the sometimes-cranky septuagenarian.

About this title

About the Author:

David R. Slavitt is the author of eighteen volumes of original poetry, including Change of Address, Falling from Silence, and PS3569.L3. He has also translated poetry collections from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Bennington College. This is his eighty-third published book.

From Booklist:

Two pieces in Slavitt's new collection speculate that they are jokes (it's debatable whether they're poems, which is, perhaps, what makes them jokes), and the title poem states that its subject was a joke. Not a very funny joke, since it consists of the ninth president's delivering the longest inaugural address ever in a driving rain, getting pneumonia, and eventually dying a month later, making his the shortest presidency. And it's untrue. Harrison was healthy for three weeks before suffering the malady that killed him, "a fictional disease," Slavitt says--so there's the joke, and it's no laff riot, either. It is typical, however, of the humor that ripples through these poems, which tease out sad, wry smiles of rueful sympathy with the human condition so reliably that the poems deepen a reader's humanity. Slavitt's often formally elegant poems gently but firmly face the foolish wisdom, apparently futile exertions, and incredible commonplaces of life, mostly in his own retired professor's existence, but also in the heroic passage of Odysseus and the perdurance of the cosmos. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0807131210
• ISBN 13: 9780807131213
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80