Musician/songwriter Terence Winch, author of Contenders and Irish Musicians/American Friends, continues his unique, robust examinations of the American psyche. Winch was selected by Irish America magazine as one of the "Top 100 Irish Americans."
Barbara Guest chose The Great Indoors as winner of the Columbia Book Award: "My selection for the 1996 Columbia Book Award is The Great Indoors by Terence Winch. I admire its atmosphere of the bitter-sweet, the expert sense of line, and its many subtle and humorous ways of Washington, D.C. I have lived in Washington and Winch understands the drift of those unenclosed by political boundaries, of the way day passes into night in that city. He has caught the essence of many moods, without exploiting them."
This book is aptly named, for the world inhabited and described by Winch is claustrophobically interior, involving airless bars, shadowy rooms and dark streets. The poet emerges as an isolated figure, whether abjectly forlorn or contemptuously cynical. The Surrealist flavor of the poems calls to mind Simic and Tate, but what Winch is best at is describing the misery of failure, in love or in living, and he adeptly captures the agitations and anxieties of an unfocused life: "These days I feel exhausted/ and crazy, like Los Angeles." For this poet, a typical day all too often "collapses/ like a condemned building." His antidote? A generous serving of tart irony: "I live a spine-tingling life/ of delirious sex & intense happiness." Winch's wry, understated humor invites the reader to share in an otherwise rueful experience. But at times, the poet appears more interested in striking an attitude or forcing poems from banalities: "I watch / baseball on t.v. (Yankees 3, Dodgers 0)/ and complain about my cold." Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Whew! There is something about Winch's poetry that leaves you breathless. Perhaps it's the grand, imagistic leaps: "quiet as brides / skirting along on sheets of ice." Brides? Ice? The fusion, the yoking, of such unlikely visions is one of Winch's great strengths. Following his poems in their majestic, airy ballet is thrilling because he's working at the edge of sense, tossing off similes and metaphors in an apparent recklessness that nevertheless seems perfectly controlled. "She is an echo shimmering / through the traffic of head-on gestures," a love poem sings, four images converging in the intersection of that shining couplet. Winch, author of the well-received Irish Musicians/American Friends (1985), writes with clear authority and great style and remains a poet to watch. Patricia Monaghan
Terence Winch, originally from New York City, now lives in the Washington, DC, area. In the early '70s, he was one of DC's "Mass Transit" poets and was closely associated with the New York writers connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in lower Manhattan. Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, has also been part of Irish-American cultural life, both as musician and writer. Some of his poetry and other writing takes its subject matter from his upbringing in a Bronx immigrant neighborhood.
His newest book of poems (Hanging Loose Press, May 2011) is called Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor. His previous title, called Boy Drinkers, is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. His collection of non-fiction stories, called That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, comes out of his experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, a band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. Many of the songs he wrote for Celtic Thunder recount the story of New York's Irish community: with "When New York Was Irish," "Saints (Hard New York Days)," and "The Irish Riviera" the best-known of them. Celtic Thunder's second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album in 1988. Terence Winch's most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disk: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch.
Winch has published five books of poems and two story collections:
Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor (Hanging Loose Press, 2011)
Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007)
Irish Musicians/American Friends (Coffee House Press, 1985), an American Book Award winner
The Great Indoors (Story Line Press, 1995), which won the Columbia Book Award
The Drift of Things (The Figures, 2001).
In addition to the non-fiction stories in That Special Place (Hanging Loose, 2004), Winch has also published a book of short stories called Contenders (Story Line, 1989).
His work is included in more than 30 anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and four Best American Poetry collections. His poems are also to be found in Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House); The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame); Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull); Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner's); Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website (Sourcebooks); and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas (Thunder's Mouth).
His work has appeared in The Paris Review, New American Writing, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Arshile, Shiny, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Agni, The World, Hanging Loose, Crab Orchard Review, New Hibernia Review, Irish Music et al.
Winch's poems have also appeared in such online journals as The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal, and have been highlighted several times on "The Writer's Almanac" radio program. Featured in a profile on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Winch was also the subject of a two-part interview on Public Radio International's "Dialogue" program. He has interviewed several leading Irish writers for the cable TV series The Writing Life, and was himself the subject of an interview with Roland Flint for the series in 1998. (For the entry on TW in The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, see www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr10/winch/winch.html).
TW has also written for The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, The Village Voice, The Wilson Quarterly, The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and other books and publications. Since 2009 he has been a regular contributor to the Best American Poetry blog---see http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/terence_winch/
Terence Winch has received an NEA Fellowship in poetry, as well as grants from the DC Commission on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Fund for Poetry. He is also the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing.
This review is from: The Great Indoors (Paperback)
I LOVED this book. I read a lot of poetry and don't normally come out with a lot of favorites, but he has given me a favorite poem here - Success Story. All of the poems are very cool and readable! (not too Irish too if you were wondering)
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I've heard Garrison Keillor read "Success Story" and "Civilized Atmospheres" on the Writer's Almanac and really loved both poems. They're both in this book, as is "Mysteries", a really funny and memorable poem that wound up in the Oxford Book of American Poetry which is kind of amazing since it features orangutans. My favorite of all the poems in this book is "My Friends". I really like the ending where it reads as follows: "But I take comfort in a dreamlike kind of consciousness/in which every breath is like my last breath/ and all my friends are quiet as brides/ skating along on sheets of ice."
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