Love If We Can Stand It - Softcover

Kawin, Bruce F

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857289217 ISBN 13: 9780857289216

Publisher: Thames River Press, 2012

Synopsis

In this collection of his best poems, Bruce F. Kawin explores many aspects of love, from the romantic to the metaphysical and from sex to mourning. The breadth of voice and form is masterful, and the poems are bold and evocative. As complex as they are, they relate plainly to real life. The book includes a sestina about a harried woman, a sonnet sequence reimagined as a slide show, a menu of potential love stories, a lesbian epic set in modern Greece and reimagined versions of old horror films, all of them charged with startling, moving and convincing visions of love. With his unique tone and subject matter, his good stories, his striking insights and his fresh, vivid language, Kawin reinvents and revives the love poem.

About this title

Book Description:

With his unique tone and subject matter, his good stories, his striking insights and his fresh, vivid language, Kawin reinvents and revives the love poem.

From the Back Cover:

Bruce Kawin has astonished me with his long poem of devastating sequences, "Two Greek Women." Only a great movie thinker and a scholar could produce such characters, such fates, such sexuality and such everyday tragedy. I have known Kawin's work since l964, and I have already admired his theoretical work on repetition. What is surprising is how he uses anaphora and even Hebraic parallelism to come up with a song-like novel that gives one relentless shots of joy. Like the entire book, the poem is precise as a tour guide to the corazon, and its parts are also musical, a word that becomes meaningful here, while we know how often it is bafflingly fuzzy. But the poem is also as American as a road-show, and as in Chantal Akerman's A Whole Night we are never ineluctably sure that we know what all these break-ups indicate--this acceptance of a drift, a drive, a situation... from the l960s as much as from tomorrow.
 
Kawin takes his knowledge of endlessness, of Stein, of the New York School and of cinema and focuses them in these poems. His sinuous strategy reaches toward something classic, Greek, and wildly fresh and original. It seems to me simply a triumph of what poetry can do, can be, can be about without mere aboutness. I read it as an experience out of Dewey: it seems inexhaustible as youth and age to me. Maybe many readings from now I will simply accept it as a journal of poetry with breadth and depth and humanity. What more can one ask for?  This book contains duets for multitudes.
 
--David Shapiro, author of Lateness, To an Idea, Mondrian's Flowers

About this edition

• Publisher: Thames River Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0857289217
• ISBN 13: 9780857289216
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96