Path, Crooked Path - Softcover

Balaban, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592388 ISBN 13: 9781556592386

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2006

Synopsis

“Balaban’s emotional range is impressively wide and deeply human—by turns compassionate and angry, somber and humorous, earnest and ironic. His voice is strong; his poems are important.”—Harvard Review

Guided by an acute moral urgency, Path, Crooked Path opens on Highway 61 and keeps moving across America and throughout the world. Juxtaposing his experiences in eastern Europe and southeast Asia against contemporary life in the United States, Balaban illuminates the humor and hypocrisy that often percolates when individuals are thrust into the mix of cultures. Whether driving past Bush’s Texas ranch, sitting at a café in Vietnam, or trading swigs of vodka with a Bulgarian exile, his poems look beyond the personal to help make sense of an often chaotic world.

From “The Great Fugue”

...I am playing The Grosse Fugue, hearing
the faded voices of those good people
who did not want to see me falter, but took me in,
schooling me in an intertwining of spirits
that like music can fill a room, that is a great fugue
weaving through us and joining generations
in charged, exquisite music that we long to hear.

John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose accolades include two National Book Award nominations, the Lamont Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His translation Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. Balaban teaches at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh.

About this title

About the Author:

John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose prizes include the Lamont Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and two National Book Award nominations. His work has been featured on NPR's "Fresh Air," New York Times, and Utne Reader. He teaches at North Carolina State University.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Not for Balaban tempests in the teapot of personal reflection. No, he is a roaming bard in a besieged world. His wry, trenchant lyrics embody the cadence of a solitary thinker walking a country road while taking measure of the axis between light and dark, life and death. Balaban considers the lonely landscapes of America's vast heartland and heartless borderland, and the absurdity, tragedy, and beauty of places redolent and riven, such as Athens, Romania, Miami, and Vietnam. Balaban marvels over plants, animals, and nature's rapid "reply to wreckage" in the wake of hurricanes. But it is humanity and its storms that concern him most as he writes of our species' love of beauty and penchant for violence with a fluent sense of history, empathy, and humor, expressing sympathy for a panhandler, admiration for an immigrant, compassion for all subjected to war, and witty disdain for those who imagine that wealth protects them. A highly regarded poet and translator of Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (2000), Balaban expresses a shrewd understanding of how the world works, and a clarion respect for life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1556592388
• ISBN 13: 9781556592386
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 110