Candy Necklace (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Cal Bedient (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series | Publication Date: April 15, 1997

The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Alive in every direction . . . an altogether unexpected and brilliant poetic debut."--Robert Hass, Boston Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"There is a truly original and powerful mind at work in this collection. It reflects one of the most sophisticated understandings of poetic voice in contemporary poetry." (David St. John ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (April 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819522341
• ISBN-13: 978-0819522344
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,612,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling and musical, this book feeds your mind and ear., June 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Candy Necklace (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Like Robert Browning in "Porphyria's Lover," Cal Bedient gets inside the heads of the ill and insane. His poems "Very Oyster, Very Few," "Grief," "Any Son of a Bitch," "The Child is the Keeper of the Garden" are especially like Browning's in their ability to evoke a startled and often deeply emotional response from the reader. The poet's facility with language is astounding: fresh, demanding, luscious, and free as in these lines from "Back a Van Gogh Yellow": "Life, you say, is the greatest / nothing, exactly imagined-- / red-gold on the wall / the ellipsoid / smear of the sun."

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Good one From Cal, April 27, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Candy Necklace (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Bedient has a happy way of putting things, and often finds it within himself to turn some inconsequential trivial everyday things into the subjects of a sonorous, sermonlike poetry. Take the "Candy Necklace" in the title poem. An elderly professor visits the student bookstore and sees a necklace made of candy for sale. "Blue, yellow, white and pink beads snuggling together." It's whimsical and fun and something suitable for the very young, so already the poem has a bit of the late Yeats AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN type of wistfulness. "They make me want a hug," Bedient confesses. And he thinks back to his daughter's precious youth. "A mountain cannot but look down/ on the clefts its heavings made. My daughter's/ the thicket in which I bleed." Bedient has a sotoriously sexual way of putting matters, and there's no sex metaphor left unchurned in his remarkable, auspicious debut.

He will go far in poetry, but based on the author photo on the back of the book, he has a kind of Jeff Chandler good looks which would have won him a certain manner of fame in the late 1950s, though the picture looks like his skin's now a little leathery maybe from the UCLA sun. Easygoing and friendly, now scary and electrifying, Bedient's poems carve themselves a new pathway through the leather saddle of American letters. He knows how to surprise the reader, and how to tickle him (or her) until nearly time for the family romance.