Work Life: New Poems - Softcover

Kane, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933527072 ISBN 13: 9781933527079

Publisher: Turtle Point Press, 2007

Synopsis

“Always an elegist, in the Vergilian mode, Kane touches greatness here in the beautiful poignance of 'Third Parent,' a farewell to his late mother-in-law. Only a handful of American poems in the last few decades perform the work of mourning so eloquently. Kane is a meditative poet resigned to a kind of faithless faith that longs for a transcendence not available to it.”—Harold Bloom

Paul Kane writes poems of heartbreaking beauty. Cerebral and emotional in equal measure, Work Life contains his most personal lyrics.

A recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Paul Kane teaches at Vassar College.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Kane is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Farther Shore and Drowned Lands. He has written a critical study of Australian poetry and edited an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poems. He has won fellowships from the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been awarded Fulbright and Mellon Grants. He teaches at Vassar College.

From Booklist:

Kane's big third collection presents poems as well crafted as any these days, as well as a wonderfully appealing persona. His poetic voice is modest, reporting ruminatively rather than solipsistically within the flow of personal experience. There's no missing his intelligence--or his cultivation. "Psyche," the long poem at this book's center, attests to his strengths rather magnificently. It springboards from an encounter with a butterfly (think of the famous, unfortunately faked, photo of Whitman and a butterfly) into a long consideration of consciousness, of the soul. It is set off by recollection of Apuleius' account in The Golden Ass of the legend of Psyche's metamorphosis into a deity and powered by a train of associations with works of art and literature that returns to the actual butterfly and its life cycle before arriving at a restorative epiphany. Perhaps Coleridge, were he with us now, would write such a poem. The shorter poems in the book's four other parts are animated by the mythical, the elegiac, the sociological, and the theological imaginations, respectively. Each is eminently rereadable. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Turtle Point Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1933527072
• ISBN 13: 9781933527079
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100