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| The Sleep of Reason
ISBN: 9780226289755
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
In a wry, arch, self-consciously Eliotic voice, Gewanter attempts in this second collection to chart a vexed moral universe: "Daily I am told/ to love my neighbor-but huddled/ inside my love is a loathing for his filthy life." Socially conscious lyrics that pick up from Robert Lowell (Gewanter was the co-editor of the recently released Lowell Collected) juxtapose the classical with the contemporary: Bill Clinton comes on as Catullus; a Parkinson's patient is called "Mr. Circe." General Motors, Hitler, Charles Atlas and John F. Kennedy Jr. appear in the book's second half. The harm/help binarism is mined relentlessly: animal rights activists free diseased rabbits; Quakers hunt whales for God. Throughout, a Lowell-like visceral force contends with a tendency toward cleverness ("Is Cassius Clay?"). "Chai 1924-2000,"an elegy for the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, can't quite forgo that archness, ruminating on "Your name, in the macaroni/ of tongues, Ah-me-hide,/ foreign and sentimental// as the pendant Chai-life-/ noosing the ancients of St. Pete/ waiting for the Early Bird Special/ ...Drop the page,/ come out. Come out." Yet the overall impression that the book leaves is of a seriousness and rigor in trying to find a means to moral clarity; even if it sometimes seems "scrawled/ onto Vanna's body," it is, finally, "a love letter/ charge/ of piety." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
David Gewanter , an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of In the Belly , which won the John C. Zacharis First Book award from Ploughshares magazine, and co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell . He has received a Witter Bynner Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award. |
