From Publishers Weekly
In this second collection (after 1992's A Circus of Want), Stein offers adept and accessible verse. He almost always writes personally: of an uncle with multiple sclerosis; of a brother-in-law who works as a telephone worker in an underground bomb-proof silo; of a painter temping as a telephone pollster; an unregretted, maybe planned, workplace accident that exempts a friend from Vietnam. In "Fathers," he depicts his father listening on shortwave radio to "the Japanese he liked best/ as a boy, its exotic clucks and twangs/ so otherworldly he'd pretend/ it was his father speaking to him/ heaven's indecipherable language." A set of 12 poems offers vignettes of his great-great-grandfather who flees Germany's 1845 potato famine and sees 19th-century America?the way west, the underground railroad, the Civil War, a fierce labor strike. Other poems tackle more modern American concerns like race and Vietnam. Stein's lines, while accomplished, are modest. They don't draw attention to themselves but instead service his themes, chief of which is the labor of harvesting some meaningful or emotional truth from the hard soil of history, circumstance and mortality.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Authorial Distance
Awaiting My Daughter's Suitor
Baseball Arrives In Richmond, Indiana, 1869
Benefit Picnic, Cigar Makers' Strike, August 1884
Black Bread
Body And Soul
Broken Pines
Fathers
First Performance Of The Rock 'n' Roll Band Puce Exit
God's Mailman
His Blue Period
Human Commerce
In The Room With Seventeen Windows
Night Shift, After Drinking Dinner, Container Corporation Of
Past Midnight, My Daughter Awakened By Miles Davis'...
Poem For Tomas And The Red-haired Girl With Asters
The Presence Of God In Our Lives
Revenant
Rooster Saved From The Soup Pot
Seeds
St. Andrew's Catholic Men's Choir, After Practice,
Two Hungers: 1. Great Famine, 1845
Two Hungers: 2. Proposal
Upon Finding A Black Woman's Door Sprayed With Swastikas
What John Chapman Left Behind
What Language Makes Of Us
What Passes For Paradise
What's Lost As Smoke Is Lost To Sky
World Without End
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Awaiting My Daughter's Suitor
Baseball Arrives In Richmond, Indiana, 1869
Benefit Picnic, Cigar Makers' Strike, August 1884
Black Bread
Body And Soul
Broken Pines
Fathers
First Performance Of The Rock 'n' Roll Band Puce Exit
God's Mailman
His Blue Period
Human Commerce
In The Room With Seventeen Windows
Night Shift, After Drinking Dinner, Container Corporation Of
Past Midnight, My Daughter Awakened By Miles Davis'...
Poem For Tomas And The Red-haired Girl With Asters
The Presence Of God In Our Lives
Revenant
Rooster Saved From The Soup Pot
Seeds
St. Andrew's Catholic Men's Choir, After Practice,
Two Hungers: 1. Great Famine, 1845
Two Hungers: 2. Proposal
Upon Finding A Black Woman's Door Sprayed With Swastikas
What John Chapman Left Behind
What Language Makes Of Us
What Passes For Paradise
What's Lost As Smoke Is Lost To Sky
World Without End
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
