Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe (CSU Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Sandra Stone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 1997

Here is a real discovery -- the secret book like the secret room one dreams about. Sandra Stone's is that rare original voice which seems to come from an awareness so unusual it can't help but be true to itself, its only real model. Brought to light out of a mother lode of language, Sandra Stone's poems create impressions, never merely receive them. This is generous and vibrant poetry. -- Sandra McPherson

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Here is a real discovery--the secret book like the secret room one dreams about. Sandra Stone's is that rare original voice which seems to come from an awareness so unusual it can't help but be true to itself, its only real model. Brought to light out of a mother lode of language, Sandra Stone's poems create , never merely recieve them. This is generous and vibrant poetry." --Sandra McPherson

About the Author

Sandra Stone grew up in Los Angeles and Seattle. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Her working life incoporates the writing of other writers; she proposes and selects literary text for public buildings and spaces. Among her recent commissions are several libraries, the Oregon State Archives Building, and a U.S. Federal courthouse. She also makes found object assemblages that incorporate dispossessed lines from her poems. For her short fictions, she is the recipient of a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Cleveland State Univ Poetry Center; 1st edition. edition (March 5, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880834251
• ISBN-13: 978-1880834251
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,312,378 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

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vibrant, hypnotic language with multiple layers of meaning, November 23, 1998

By 

Linda Hathaway Bunza, Columbia Research Ins... (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe (CSU Poetry Series) (CSU Poetry Series) (CSU Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

The reader is simultaneously illuminated by darkness and light when reading Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe. With sobriety, irony, sarcasm, humor, and sorrow, Stone skillfully carries us through universal themes: love and its absence, the arts, family and solitude, mortality and the body, and the inexorability of the dark. Each poem is an intricate labyrinth of phrases and rhythms, which entice the reader who hangs over the edge of meaning. "A shadow elongates/ and slips through the gate, a foreigner/ with no meat on its bones." (p. 30)

Dissonant rhythms, irregular syntax, and unusual vocabulary awaken dormant places lying deep within us. Verbal contrasts and evocative rhythms mesmerize, unsettle, captivate, and hypnotize. Soft, gentle words, like "a shadow elongates" combined with abrupt, sharp-angled phrases like "febrile ruckus" show us that Stone is an accomplished master of juxtapositions. The author has complete control of her universe of words which aim towards a vanishing point of solitude. Magnetic phrases draw us towards each poem's center-centers which often lead us to life's edges. Each word, a prop on the poem's stage, is placed to release precise ambiguity of meaning. Her enigmatic titles, "Emissary Shadow," "Sun in an Empty Room," and "The Art of Crackage" are as mysterious as they are precise.

Stone constructs an exotic poetic scaffolding of elaborate phrases infused with darkness. Taking us to the boundaries of the human condition, to "the vacated events we make myths of" (p. 44), her language to describe the dark is paradoxically bright and invigorating. Her title poem, "Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe" is a carnival of language dancing over darkness. Some 400 years ago, Flemish artist, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whom Stone invokes, mastered such combinations of revelry and death in his apocalyptic paintings.

As vibrancy and laughter share center stage with solitude and darkness in Stone's poetry, words, at the edge of life's nothing, summon life's everything. Readers who enter this rich, textural cafe of poems will delight in the multiple layers of meaning that continue to resonate when the poetry ends.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry that resonates, March 28, 2009

By 

Andrea Hollander Budy (Mountain View, AR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe (CSU Poetry Series) (Paperback)

My favorite section of Sandra Stone's COCKTAILS WITH BRUEGHEL AT THE MUSEUM CAFE is the eponymous one in which the poet focuses on such famous artists, writers, and musicians as Giacometti, Kafka, Rilke, and Stravinsky. In one such poem ("Dickinson, Bishop, and Stein"), Stone asks, "How often does the simple subject / confound our simple grasp?" Certainly the best poems in Stone's volume deliver such subjects indelibly so that her reader is neither confounded nor confused. And every look outward, in the hands of this writer, is also a look inward, providing us with a deep sense of ourselves. This is exactly the kind of resonance I hope for in a volume of poems.