Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology - Hardcover

Heyen, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1877770248 ISBN 13: 9781877770241

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1991

Synopsis

In the title poem of Pterodactyl Rose, the speaker tells us that when he drives he peers into his rear-view mirror and imagines the air behind him filling with the bodies of those ancient creatures his internal combustion engine is burning. He says he is wild with prayer and longing, as we all are as we enter a 21st century that will probably determine whether mankind will have a long tenure on this planet or will be just another vanished species. In poem after poem here, William Heyen probes the roots of our unprecedented ecological crisis and carries us with him. His voice is the voice of his “Crickets”: “... the ones that still / have their legs, keep scraping them together, / listen, maybe for the last time on earth, listen . . .”

About this title

About the Author:

William Heyen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate degree is from State University of New York at Brockport, where he is a professor of English and poet in residence; his graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature to Germany, he has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His writing has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Harper's, TriQuarterly, Ontario Review, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review, and in more than a hundred anthologies.

Review:

Now, in its mature range, William Heyen's voice has taken on the burden of knowing that the worst losses are not the ones behind us, but rather the ones directly ahead -- the losses, that is, to the biosphere, that threaten its very viability....Heyen's recent poetry...addresses our question of questions: "Can we imagine, are we capable of imagining, our survival on this earth?" --Jarold Ramsey, author of Reading the Fire: The Traditional Indian Literature of the Far West

About this edition

• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1877770248
• ISBN 13: 9781877770241
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 61