God (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Debora Greger (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: June 5, 2001

God has retired to Florida, like everyone else. He can't sleep. He watches TV. In the long poem that opens Debora Greger's sixth book, God, he has retreated to the swamps, where, in the lush particulars of the subtropics, a singular moral world is discovered. Wherever Greger is, she has a traveler's eye; her poetry finds the past beneath the present-where the "Eden of Florida," as the last poem ironically calls it, is an Eden with alligators. This is the work of a powerful, meditative poet, whose God is deceptively quiet, perfectly timed, and seriously amused.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For a book of poems with such a portentous title, Greger's sixth book is at times little more than a trifle. Surely, one can't take "God the alligator [who] had second thoughts" seriously, not when the poet asks such a creature, "am I cold-blooded, too, alligator?/ I've heard you crossed the street,/ the light being green,/ to the natural history museum." It's clear that humor is what Greger is after when she sends her retired God down to her home state of Florida to "watch public television much of the evening." But there is little charm or Stevensian wit in such silliness, however juvenile or benign. Perhaps the speaker has been cooped up for too long in her own ivory tower ("where we rode the elevator/ to higher and higher office"), alluding to the likes of the Holy Bible, Cioran, Yeats, Keats, Shakespeare, Ovid and Aquinas without conveying their sense of gravity. Greger's elegies for Howard Moss and Amy Clampitt, rendered in elegant quatrains stripped of levity, summon a deeper music "heard from the other side," poems that emanate a "deathlike rattle, the raw ululation/ hewn from the pine barrens of this world,// planed and sanded into a threnody." Greger finally hits her lyrical stride in poems like "Head, Perhaps of an Angel" and "The Ruined Abbey" (a triptych of ekphrastic sonnets), exhibiting both formal grace and ease. Like Mary Jo Salter and Cynthia Zarin, all Clampitt devotees, Greger too finds spiritual sustenance through careful observations on nature and art.

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From Booklist

Greger, author of Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (1996) and a poet of both wit and lyricism, fuses the stony past with the plastic present to yield new cultural gold. In the opening cycle in her stimulating new collection, she improvises to wonderful comedic and cosmic effect on the vision of a retired god, a lonely old insomniac hanging out in Florida mulling over past failings in front of the TV, on the golf course, and in Disney's realm. But God is also a worm and an alligator, and Greger, as much a nature poet as she is a sly metaphysician, parlays her glimpses of an old God in the New World into classic meditations on the English countryside, which cede to thoughts of death and our futile struggles to thwart it. Insouciant on the surface and intensely serious beneath, Greger reminds readers that whatever God's clothes-wearing creatures get up to--making war in his name, paving wetlands, writing books--the earth will ultimately erase us. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140424334
• ISBN-13: 978-0140424331
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,863,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)