As up-to-date as the current cosmography, as steeped in tradition as ancient agriculture, George Bradley's The Fire Fetched Down overflows with energy, humor, and intellectual curiosity. Readers will find the aesthetic detachment and technical proficiency they have come to expect of Bradley's work, but they will discover other, more immediate attractions as well. The poet sounds new notes in his new book, among them the bemused intimacy of "Ode to Absent-Mindedness" and the uneasy excursion of "Frug Macabre." From lyric outburst to contemplative essay, from myths of origin to postmodern manifestos, the work assembled here is of a heady variety in subject and style. Bradley does not lose his balance, though, and he manages to effect an equilibrium between inspection and introspection. By turns exuberant and wistful, informative and sly, The Fire Fetched Down is also serious fun. Bradley offers those most human of pleasures, the cultivation of language and the exercise of second thought. This is poetry intended to entertain in the largest sense of the word.
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Editorial Reviews
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"George Bradley's The Fire Fetched Down earns its Promethean title, and helps persuade me that American poetry will go on maintaining itself as a high art even now and in worse days to come, when politicized bad verse (when it is even verse) is celebrated in the academies and in the media. Bradley, now fully individuated, has the cognitive power, the rhetorical gifts, the primal exuberance of language, and the spiritual vision, to develop into the Merrill or Ashbery of his own generation. Everything in The Fire Fetched Down will sustain, and reward, many readings."
-- Harold Bloom
-- Harold Bloom
From the Inside Flap
As up-to-date as the current cosmography, as steeped in tradition as ancient agriculture, George Bradley's The Fire Fetched Down overflows with energy, humor, and intellectual curiosity. Readers will find the aesthetic detachment and technical proficiency they have come to expect of Bradley's work, but they will discover other, more immediate attractions as well. The poet sounds new notes in his new book, among them the bemused intimacy of "Ode to Absent-Mindedness" and the uneasy excursion of "Frug Macabre." From lyric outburst to contemplative essay, from myths of origin to postmodern manifestos, the work assembled here is of a heady variety in subject and style. Bradley does not lose his balance, though, and he manages to effect an equilibrium between inspection and introspection. By turns exuberant and wistful, informative and sly, The Fire Fetched Down is also serious fun. Bradley offers those most human of pleasures, the cultivation of language and the exercise of second thought. This is poetry intended to entertain in the largest sense of the word.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Full Bodied Sip of George Bradley,
By Dr. Jacqueline Brice-Finch (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Fire Fetched Down (Hardcover)
The Fire Fetched Down, George Bradley's 1996 poetry volume, is a tour de force. But let me warn the uninitiated, Bradley, like Yusef Komunyakaa, is a consummate wordsmith. Plan to read with a huge unabridged dictionary nearby. Bradley's poems were well worth that exercise!! He delights in using the exact technical term or to flesh out the simplest of scenes, the most common of actions. My favorite poem is Bradley's "A Georgic for Douglas Crase," ostensibly about the fine art of wine-making--from the planting to the harvesting to the tasting and bottling. However, the care with which the speaker instructs the grower is a metaphor for the writer's ars poetica. Since poetry can be defined as compressed language, Bradley's word choice is as exact as humanly possible. Like the variables which beset the wine-maker, this poet wends his way through the labyrinth of human discourse--the oral and written--to produce highly individualized poems, rare vintage all.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fetching as Starlight,
By
This review is from: The Fire Fetched Down (Paperback)
After the first reading I really couldn't think of anything to say about this collection. I liked it well enough, but nothing struck me as memorable-one phrase only, and it's right out of the gate in "Frug Macabre": "Or is it that thought and action/are irreconcilable enemies/(as Emerson says somewhere,/and he's got lots of somewhere,/you'll have to find it yourself)". This was resonant of my own experience with Emerson, try looking into more than his essays, which are "lots of somewhere" in themselves. But as you read further you imagine that Bradley knows exactly where to locate this in Emerson. And, indeed, "Frug Macabre" also has lots of somewhere, and perhaps contains nearly every theme and idea that will be addressed in the poems to come. What becomes clear is that this is a poet of considerable craft and erudition (it is apparent from previous volumes through this latest that he is especially well-versed in physics). These are poems that must be revisited in order to begin to understand all that is present within them. They will float by, quietly as "distance drifts above a tranquil sea", but lay hands on only one of them and you will begin to open the other worlds present in poetry.This volume has a prefatory poem with the rest of the 21 poems divided into four sections. Sections I and IV consist of one long poem each. Sections II and III contain mostly lyrics in various forms, from ode to sonnet to villanelle. It is an impressive, formal array. Bradley ends with a Georgic (for Doug Crase, a poet, author of "The Revisionist"), a didactic poem intended to instruct or teach a skill in an art or science (see Hesiod)-in this case wine-making-while imparting life-lessons along the way, or at least bits and pieces of aphoristic wisdom. This "instruction" is really what most of these poems attempt. They teach us to see through our received perceptions, most pointedly our perceptions of morality. But let's begin at the beginning-here we discover what we should be prepared for as readers. The prefatory poem, "6 X 10 X infinity" ("infinity" is printed as the sign for infinity, the sideways 8), begins with the image of the hand of the poet (and reader-for we must perform the same acts of interpretation) removing a book from the shelf and entering into the world of the book, which is more than one other world, but many. This is surely intended to mean this book and what follows. The language used also prepares us: the book is a "levelled block of reason", the poem "a small aperture", this life "worn and circumscribed", the "general life" found in the book is an "immense atmosphere." And what is central: "Here is no response, simple of the soul, physic/Compound of metaphysics, broken wafer to make us whole." We will not get answers-these poems will not absolve us, will not lead us to unity and bring our science in line with our religion. Poems must cast light on the interior ("candles dancing on the desk") for "Outside, it is any time of day. Outside, night falls." Our solace is Here, in this book, in these poems, in the mind's other worlds where "we transform ourselves, become things seen,/Fetching, even as starlight, our wink infinite." This is playfully serious ("a wink infinite"), and this poem and its companions are "fetching" even as they do indeed "fetch" fire down.
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