Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 110
- Language: English
- Published: May, 2013
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-92-3
Praise
As Paul Pines moves through two cities he reminds us that “We go where we must to find / what we need.” And what he finds is plenty – plenty in all senses and for all the senses. From poems that hang out in the crazy costumes, poignant hilarities, and irreverent reverences of Mardi Gras, to those that fly with hermes over the roofs of Paris, explore light with Monet and Pissarro, and walk graveyards in the wake of Apollinaire – this book brims, seethes, teems, with qi, duende, life. here is a magnanimity of vision that touches myths, rituals and philosophies, that garners pasts, presences and absences, that engenders probabilities, realities and impossibilities. Encompassing space-travel, dream-travel and mind-travel, here is an immense, vibrant, moving canvas —RICHARD BERENGARTEN
Excerpt
FIRST AND LAST THINGS AT THE CROISSANT D’OR
Knowledge without courage
is sterile, Gracian
calls out from his Jesuit cell
as if to warn us against
what the age of reason
never realized
that the world might become
so crowded with proofs
there’d be nothing left to feed
its hungry mouths
starving for mystery
or the will to rise refreshed
from a sleep so thoroughly
soaked in after-birth
Author
PAUL PINES grew up in Brooklyn around the corner from Ebbet’s Field and passed the early 60s on the Lower East Side of New York. He shipped out as a Merchant Seaman, spending 65–66 in Vietnam, after which he drove a cab and tended bar. Pines opened his jazz club, The Tin Palace, in 1973. It became the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel (Morrow, 1983). Redemption (Editions du Rocher, 1997), a second novel, is set against the genocide of Guatemalan Mayans. His memoir, My Brother’s Madness, (Curbstone Press, 2007) explores the unfolding of intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. Pines has published nine books of poetry: Onion, Hotel Madden Poems, Pines Songs, Breath, Adrift on Blinding Light, Taxidancing, Last Call at the Tin Palace, Reflections in a Smoking Mirror and Divine Madness. Poems set by composer Daniel Asia appear on the Summit label which includes Asia’s 5th Symphony (settings of Pines’ poems and those by Yehuda Amichai), andThe Tin Angel Opera based on Pines’ novel. As a translator he has contributed to Small Hours of the Night, Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, (Curbstone, 1996);Pyramids of Glass, (Corona 1995); Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected, (New Directions, 1986). He is the editor of the Juan Gelman tribute issue of The Cafe Review (Summer, 2009) and Gelman’s selected poems translated by Hardie St. Martin, Dark Times/ Filled with Light (Open Letters Press, 2012). Pines lives with his wife, Carol, in Glens Falls, NY, where he practices as a psychotherapist and hosts the Lake George Jazz Weekend.
For more information: http://www.paulpines.com/ & http://www.tinangelopera.com/
