Description
- Kind: Perfect Bound
- Pages: 115
- Language: English
- Available: Yes
- Audio CD: No
- ISBN: 978-1933675411
Praise
“To read Scribe is to pass ‘through a series of gates’ into the paradoxical heart of the poem, where “terror and enchantment,” the communal and the solitary, the light and the dark, the imaginings of adult and child come together in an ancient music entirely of our moment. Norman Finkelstein here articulates the permissions and responsive urgencies of poetic engagement, echoing now ballad music – or magic, now the muted voice of dailiness, now the lyric strains of desire.” Michael Palmer
“The poems in Scribe are written, as the poet writing them tells us, in the voices of a ’scribe turned into a scribe’… a poet who feels the shapes with which his poems are to be assembled and chanted, who composes in invented perfection the deepest recordings of the most deeply human… a scribe inscribing our most sacred truths. …. Scribe is a masterpiece by a master poet….” Lawrence Joseph
An Excerpt
THE RELEASE
Over the border you look with longing
until one day there is only longing
waiting to be fulfilled.
You drive and drive in love’s dominion,
hardly thinking you will meet with danger
forgotten and yet foretold.
There are static streams in a fluid world,
measured lines where the meadows curl
in upon themselves like prayer.
There is weather, and the wether threatens;
there are figures, and the figures beckon
to a place of perfect rest.
The lovers rise up from the leaves around you
and their kisses are the sound of leaves around you
and their kisses are leaves.
About the Author
Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1954. He received his B.A. from Binghamton University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has lived since 1980. His books of poetry include Restless Messengers (Georgia, 1992), Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007), and the three-volume serial poem Track: Track (Spuyten Duyvil, 1999), Columns (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), and Powers (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). He has also written extensively about modern and post-modern poetry, and about Jewish literature. His books of criticism include Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (SUNY, 2002) and Lyrical Interference: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2004). On Mt. Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2010.
