Cities and Towns: Poems [Paperback]

Arthur Vogelsang (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vogelsang (A Planet and Twentieth Century Women), who has been an editor at the American Poetry Review for over 20 years, employs mega-imagery ("he worried for the entire world"), a disorientation of time and place and metaphysical pondering couched in everyday language. In "Lyric," thinking of writing a song on a cross-country road trip, the speaker wonders: "Put the sun's memory in it./ What? What? My memory of the sun from earlier today/ Or the sun's memory in its own brain?" This collection, winner of the publisher's 1995 Juniper Prize, is a slippery fish of a book. The poems reflect the effort, grace and intelligence of a practiced poet, but their actual content seems to evaporate with the turn of a page. Exhibiting neither uniquely disturbing visions nor off-the-wall perceptions, these poems have the effect of flashes of landscape seen from a speeding car or snatches of vivid conversation overheard at a bar: they command a reader's attention but have difficulty holding it.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

2215 Spruce
The Alps
Arizona
Bad Boy
Character
Conversation In Increasing Stanzas
Drifters
Empire
Epic
The Escape
The Face
Forked
The Four Ghosts
The Future
The Grass On The Other Side
The Hebrus River
How Far Can You Swim? Two Hours
Is It Him Or Us
Kern County
Lyric
Material
Merovingian
My Fate
New Street
The Nose, The Grand Canyon, And The Sixties
Pants On Fire
Philadelphia
The Readers
Rue Replique
Say No
Second Avenue
Secret
Signals Crossed
Skip Tracers
Slipping Around
Soft Then Hard
Sunken Relief
Swollen Haiku
Tarjetas Postales
Two Monkeys
Two Problems
The Umbrella
What Is That Thing
Which Letter
You'll Feel Better Afterward
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 73 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr; First edition (April 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558490213
• ISBN-13: 978-1558490215
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,130,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From FIELD, January 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Cities and Towns: Poems (Paperback)

...by far his best and most ambitious book to date and one of the best of last year....Vogelsang has found an interrogating voice at once dissembling and direct -- and by direct I mean free of any rhetorical reference that doesn't lead us immediately to his moment. Much of the time the speaker in these new poems is close to Swiftian in his cagey unreliability....Under the surface of the voice, however, is a kind of moral indignation, a menacing anger that is sometimes self-directed. All in all, Vogelsang has created the rare sound of dark, Juvenalian complaint in a lyric sequence whose satiric target seems to be absurdity itself. The tone, in fact -- and this is a power in the best of the poems -- feels barely contained, the ardent big talk almost too big for the imagination asked to hold it. "Big" also applies to the size of the heart in these poems, their ability to find and/or magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously.