Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 72
- Language: English
- Published: October, 2014
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-17-4
Praise
A Civilization, Fred Muratori’s compelling collection, embraces its subject as an embedded contradiction: Lost now, and in/ need of reconstruction./This dark age,/never more/enlightened,/falls prey/to self-regard,/its beauty/recognized by torchlight,/shouted to the night. More than a Freudian imposition of will and idea on a savage “id,” civilization emerges as the mystery at the heart of consciousness: No pruning/ tames the vine,/the bold momentum./More than ever/ hope and blindness/ arc the known, describing next. The poet’s lines, fragments of broken sense, point like an explicate finger at an implicate order, the elusive flow impaled on our yearning for wholeness, the mother of sorrow, the father of war, and the glue that holds us together. More than a reflection on Heraclitean strife, Muratori’s work gives us a glimpse of the container that attempts to hold the flow of All Things, a poem unto itself, an impossible imperative that demands our attention—commands it. —Paul Pines
Excerpt
IV
A need for why
replenishes
with morning. Face
questions face,
razors change
the premise: new
seeming new.
And what, it asks,
are we, to be
questioned by
our premises?
Vertigo, fear.
Hold quickly to
the strap of reason,
stay questioning
with facts.
But there are few,
so few, and the light
disputes them.
Author
Born and raised near New Haven, Connecticut, Fred Muratori is an alumnus of Fairfield University and of the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University, where he studied with Philip Booth and W.D. Snodgrass. He is the author of two prior full-length poetry collections, The Spectra (Stockport Flats Press, 2011) and Despite Repeated Warnings (Basfal Books, 1994), as well as a chapbook, The Possible (State Street Press, 1988). His poems and prose poems have appeared widely in journals such as The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Hotel Amerika, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Verse, River Styx, and Stone Canoe; in the anthology series The Best American Poetry and The Best of the Prose Poem; the textbook Writing Dangerous Poetry; and on the Poetry Daily web site. His reviews of contemporary poetry can be found in Boston Review, American Book Review, Library Journal, Manhattan Review, and Notre Dame Review, among others. A recipient of poetry writing grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation, he lives in Ithaca, New York and works as the Bibliographer for English-language Literature, Theater and Film at the Cornell University Library.
