Dusty Angel (American Poets Continuum) [Paperback]

Michael Blumenthal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999 | Series: American Poets Continuum (Book 56)

Poems that speak to lust, love and loss.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

There aren't many poets these days who can get away with using words like beautiful and wonderful and good--but in Blumenthal's work, these words seem fresh and underutilized. Blumenthal (The Wages of Goodness) writes in a style that is pure, simple, utterly accessible, loving, lyrical, and full of emotion. He writes of a Scrabble game: "as you wind up with family and I end with above/ on this old, fated gameboard of luck and love." In this book, which won the 1999 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, he speaks about everything from chairs to pineapples to his small son's antics to a wasp that has entered his study. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal holds the Darden Distinguished Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He is author of Dusty Angel (BOA, 1999), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as four other poetry books, one novel, one memoir, an essay collection, and translations of poems by Peter Kantor. Publications include The New Yorker, and Paris Review.

Product Details

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; Uncorrected Proofs. edition (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880238810
• ISBN-13: 978-1880238813
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,534,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Blumenthal graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, was published by BOA Editions in May, 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has recently been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian, he practices psychotherapy with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest and spends summers at his house in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. In May of 2007, he spent a month in South Africa working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation in Phalaborwa, an experience about which he has written for Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. He currently holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He was the featured poet at The Power of Writing Journal Conference in Denver in June of 2008, and currently holds The Copenhaver Visiting Chair of Law at The University of West Virginia College of Law. He can be reached at: www.michael-blumenthal.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dusty Angel by Michael Blumenthal, March 13, 2000

By 

David Howlett (Herndon, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dusty Angel (Hardcover)

Dusty Angel by Michael Blumenthal

"The profane and the sacred, the noble and the daemonic": the balance of these in one life is one of the recurring themes in Michael Blumenthal's new book Dusty Angel.

The book has many moments of affirmation and hope. At several points in the book, the poet highlights the importance of joy and pleasure in our lives. After watching the antics of a house cat, Blumenthal concludes:

What can we learn from him who lives here, neutered, wormed, domesticated, curled? -

How to reanimate again our lifeless world.

("Le Chat")

In another poem, he observes, "Pleasure is something we need / To center us - holy - wherever we find it." ("Saxophone").

In other poems, he presents a dark vision of fate:

Who among us wouldn't gladly be the chooser, if only the choice weren't a vast road looping over and over to arrive at the same place? ("The Forces")

Mr. Blumenthal is a graduate of an Ivy League law school. But these poems sound not in law, but in the nineteenth century philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. "The Wasp in the Study," for instance, presents an allegory of subject and object, the mind and the outside world. Like a wasp trapped indoors,

the mind remains a captive of the room it's in, a tomb of many-colored windows with no door to test the scintillating glass it sets its visions of escape against.

Sometimes, Blumenthal seems naïve, such as in a poem about the Palestinian intifada in which he seems to say "there is so much beauty in the land of Israel; why can't we all be friends?" ("Anti-fada"). On the other hand, one of the most moving poems describes the succession of generations through the image of a father and son skiing:

I am still better at this than he is, though I won't be for long, and so he follows me down the white hills of the Sangre de Cristos, he who wants to be better than his father is, as I've tried to be better than mine, though the trails and rivulets of paternity are deep, marked in greens and blues and, finally, blacks to signify the most difficult . . .

These poems are very personal but at the same time they describe universal problems and ideas. The language is never obscure and the images are fresh. This is a very enjoyable book by one of America's best poets.

1 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars BORING!, April 21, 2001

By 

Stephen Moore "Stephen" (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dusty Angel (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)

Blumenthal's poetry is ridden with "poetic cliches." No wonder the angel's dusty.