Description
- Kind: Perfect
- Pages: 60
- Language: English
- Published: October 2012
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-83-1
Praise
“Intrinsic in Louis Zukofsky’s striving for the “Upper limit music” was not merely, perhaps, an acquiescence to imperfection, an abandonment of an imagined ideal. There was also the celebration of the incomplete— an open-endedness crucial to an authentic response to the world of his time. Jon Curley does not work within inherited registers and meters of the rhetorical tradition Zukofsky brilliantly exploited, a tradition whose paradigm is perfection; instead this younger poet, uninterested in nostalgia, finds the music of his own time, or better to say he creates it. That he allows this music to guide his poems toward their provisional truths, the only truths anyone can hope to know—that he establishes a music and within it a way of knowing authentic to our present—is a testament not only to his honesty but to his skill as well. Thus this marvelous volume of thoughtful lyricism, in all its skeptical rigor, provides a guide for how to live in our tremulous moment—his poems’ “figuration lurching between / incandescence and oblivion.” Angles of Incidents, in setting out for a new world, sets out a new world—a world that, for all its difficulties, has its beauties too.” —Burt Kimmelman
“The poetry of Jon Curley is intelligent, lean, and compelling. He is a young poet with worlds to explore and the words to do so.” —Samuel Menashe
Excerpt
Existents and Precipitants
Like watching the scene from an angle
As it stretches itself out, grows anamorphic
And between the bodies and their outlines
You can see the widening inner spaces growing
Outer, indications of ingenious layering effects
of perception which, if stripped, reveal the sub
phenomena of aura, arriving into this world
from some others:
These we can call the angels of incidence
Author
Jon Curley’s first volume of poems, New Shadows, was published in 2009 by Dos Madres Press. He is a senior university lecturer of Humanities at the new Jersey Institute of Technology and has published a book of criticism, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland (Sussex Academic Press, 2011). In addition to teaching, Curley works with children at Battery Park in new York City, just across from Poets House, and leads walking tours about nature and poetry.
