The Invisible World Is in Decline (9) - Softcover

Whiteman, Bruce

9781770416574: The Invisible World Is in Decline (9)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770416579 ISBN 13: 9781770416574

Verlag: ECW Press, 2022

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Sales and Market BulletsWhiteman has worked as a rare book specialist at McMaster University, McGill University, and UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles), and is a founding member of the Hamilton Poetry Centre.Whiteman contributes book reviews and essays regularly to publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Hudson Review, and Canadian Notes & Queries.AudienceCanadian poetry readersSubscribers to publications like CNQ and the Literary Review of Canada The stunning conclusion to a 40-year poetic projectIn the tradition of earlier modernist long poems like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and bp Nichol’s The Martyrology, The Invisible World Is in Decline: Book IX is full of startling poetic music and imagery while addressing concerns to which every reader will respond: the life of the heart as well as life during COVID-19, love as well as death, philosophy as well as emotion. The poems are deeply responsive to what an epigraph from Virgil calls “vows and prayers,” i.e., those things that we desire and promise. Like previous books of Whiteman’s long poem, Book IX is largely in the form of the prose poem. But the book also contains a moving series of translations in traditional form of texts taken from songs by composers like Schubert and Beethoven, songs that are by turns tragic, meditative, lyrical, and touching. The concluding section focuses on an obsession that poets have had for 2,500 years: inspiration, in the form of the nine Muses. At the heart of this book is what Whiteman calls “the bright articulate world,” something visionary but accessible to every thoughtful reader.

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Bruce Whiteman is a well-known poet and reviewer who lives in Peterborough and teaches part-time at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. His book reviews have appeared widely in Canada and the U.S. His long poem, The Invisible World Is in Decline, has been appearing in installments since 1984.

Auszug. � Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

From “In Disgrace with God” by Bruce Whiteman

A million have died and hell is everywhere. The lists on sites and daily sound bites in the press that hist us into silence, exhausted before the gone and unknown dead. Wherever they go, there sighs are all that are heard.

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Remembering the dead, our lot is to walk carefully forward. Not to fall headlong from hour to hour, from day to day, hurled like water from edge to edge, into the darkness that yawns beneath our steps. Like a man on a wire we don't look back and can't look down, but focus straight ahead.

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Reflecting off the ice from a rooftop across the street, the sun shines inside the room. The weather is so beautiful.

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The solstice will occur in the blink of an eye: grey skies, bare trees.

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A dog in the park across the street runs hard and makes a beeline for a tennis ball, the only green thing in sight. Saturn and Jupiter are as close as they have looked since Monteverdi was alive. The dog stops on a dime and runs the ball back to square one. Off it flies again in a perfect arc through the cold morning air.

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We turn around the sun in the ecliptic and long for spring.