Customer Reviews

Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This retrospective collection of Lawrence Joseph's poetry (which I've read avidly for years) is cause for celebration. Since "Shouting at No One" (which, with Joseph's second book, "Curriculum Vitae", and his third book, "Before Our Eyes", are presented in full in "Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos"), Joseph has written with a pure and driving ambition seldom seen in the casual world of contemporary poetry. His poetry is both intellectually and emotionally challenging and intense. What I like most about "Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos" is how Joseph constantly pushes language both above and below the radars of the aesthetic orthodoxies rampant in American poetry today, into realms of language truly original and new. From the beginning, Joseph builds his own tradition, out of the traditions of poetries as diverse as those of Williams and Brecht, Stevens and Akhmatova, Lowell and Montale, Adrienne Rich and James Schuyler, George Oppen and Paul Celan. If you want to read poetry that is written as if poetry really matters, I can't recommend this book enough.

This is a fabulous book of poetry...we have all gotten off course with not actually reading much poetry...this book will bring you back.