The Engrafted Word: Poems [Hardcover]

Karl Kirchwey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1998

The graftings of flesh upon flesh, of history upon time and memory, of the New World on the Old, of language upon silence, of faith upon doubt: These are the graftings that form this third book of poems by Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner Karl Kirchwey. Whether he is writing of the intimate moment, as in "Sonogram" (in which the poet first sees his son-to-be), or the painfully personal, as in "Barium" (in which he recounts a brush with mortality), Kirchwey reaches effortlessly across time to link us to our past, to the larger universe of humankind. From the deep sensuousness of "Amalfi" to the gently mocking "Syracuse," from the haunting echoes of the past in "Two Landscapes in Numidia" to the almost blasphemous bitter edge of "Twelve Epigrams for Passion Week, Ischia," he graces us with poetics of a high order even while weaving the threads that tie this collection into a stunningly integrated whole. These are indeed poems that reward rereading.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mysterious, compelling, abounding in allusion, the poems of Karl Kirchwey demand--and deserve--our fullest attention. In The Engrafted Word he presents one conventionally ordinary scene after another: a hospital room, a zoo, the view from a bus, a child watching birds. Yet always the poet reveals an underlying potential for the miraculous. In "Sonogram," for instance, the sight of an unborn fetus elicits an eloquent apostrophe. Elsewhere Kirchwey discerns the dead soul of his mother in an elephant's eyes, prompting this unlikely but moving elegy:

I mourned again, and worshiped after her,
buried in this landslide of a creature,
its crushing, dreamlike step, its slack repose,
its gaze, deep as the past or the hereafter...

Ezra Pound argued that "it is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." In this collection, Kirchwey surpasses Pound's instruction, creating not only a bumper crop of indelible imagery but a meticulous record of what it means to be human. --Martha Silano --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Delicately crafted and suffused with eros, the spare, lucid poems of Kirchwey's third collection continue mapping the ghostly presences conjured by travel and the historical imagination. Lingering first in New England, this poet's quiet classicism gradually unveils the falling empire of late-antiquity Rome, quarries in Tunisia and Passion Week on the decaying island of Ischia. "Roman Spring" presents juxtapositions that reveal the city's competing incarnations: "jasmine and excrement; flowering capers;/ the salt sea smell behind the smell of petroleum;// ...and a travertine curb polished like something priceless/ by the bus's slow turn as it grinds uphill." Building on the achievements of A Wandering Island (1990) and Those I Guard (1993), Kirchwey's impressive formalist tendencies emerge in "Villanelle," "The Wound" (a six-sestet ekphrasis of Verrocchio's Christ and Saint Thomas) and "The Horologium of Augustus," set in stanzas whose lines ingeniously imitate the exponential increments of the title's sundial. Devious, sardonic wit comes to the fore in "Arcadia" and "Syracuse," both of which parody the excesses of a traveler's expectations. Other poems are unexpectedly personal: the paired sonnets "Zoo Story" and "In Transit" find the poet arrested by objects and places that recall his late mother and father, and "Tiber Island" becomes the setting for a poignant elegy for Amy Clampitt. Whatever weathered sites Kirchwey's lyrics visit, they contain fresh, theatrical mysteries and sustain the awareness of an uneasy fit between the real and ideal. (Apr.) FYI: Kirchway is director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York City.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (April 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805056068
• ISBN-13: 978-0805056068
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,468,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Layer upon Layer, April 10, 2000

By 

Libby Larsen (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Engrafted Word: Poems (Paperback)

Kirchwey does an amazing job of synthesizing ideas from a number of spheres- such as obstetrics, physics, superstition, mythology, biology, religion, chemistry, Roman history and poetry. Kirchwey accomplishes said task by engrafting technical words upon each other, words that outwardly have little in common. Moreover, Kirchwey's great use of setting enables me to feel the location of each poem. I need not piece stilted descriptions together in a linguistic, logical manner, but rather, I subconsciously gain a poignant and fluid perception of my surroundings. And again, I think Kirchwey achieves this through diction specific to the time and region. He magically engrafts the past with the present, my familiarities with his familiarities, and our modern-day collective representations with those of peoples' long ago. Bravo.