Haunt [Paperback]

Keith Waldrop (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0967985404 | ISBN-13: 978-0967985404 | Publication Date: January 1, 2000

Poetry. Keith Waldrop's new book continues and deepens the examination of meaning, connotation, denotation, and meaninglessness implicit in his work. Many titles by this major poet, translator, and editor continue to be available from SPD: ANALOGIES OF ESCAPE, LOCALITY PRINCIPLE, THE EIGHTH DAY, and others. Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop edit Burning Deck in Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The themes of life's ephemerality and language's tragicomic trailing after it are familiar to readers of Waldrop, a translator of Anne-Marie Albiach and Edmond JabŠs and the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including the selected The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander. The border between the abstract and the concrete is sharply drawn in these poems, if only to be continuously bridged, or to dwell on the ramifications of their contact: "An aging house, well yes he/ understands that but suddenly/ down it falls." The odd sparse prose accrues to form three major sections: "Indication," "Between the Straits" and "Potential Random." Waldrop is able to move the work through propositions that would undermine a less mature use of tonal slippages, unreliable narration and contradictions of the "there is no everything" sort. One gets the sense, in poems like "Indication," of stepping into ongoing processes for taking hold of ideas, dreams and even reality: "idea by idea/ my body regains its/ argument." One of the book's interlocutors may be the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who once observed that "We think in generalities, but we live in details." How the details of feeling mingle with our conceptions of the world provide Waldrop with a window on a life "new every morning" and make for a writing that is a kind of cenotaph to itself, able only to haunt existence rather than to fully take it up. (May 1)Forecast: Along with spouse Rosemarie Waldrop (A Key into the Language of America), Waldrop has taught for many years in Brown University's writing program and copublishes Burning Deck books celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. This book will certainly reach the small-press community; review attention, for which Waldrop is overdue, could get it into more stores and make a collected more likely.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Keith Waldrop is author of numerous collections of poetry and is the translator of The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabes, as well as works by Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach and Jean Grosjean. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and DAAD (Berlin). His titles include HEGEL'S FAMILY, THE OPPOSITE OF LETTING THE MIND WANDER: SELECTED POEMS AND A FEW SONGS, SHIPWRECK IN HAVEN: TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES, The Balustrade, Light While There is Light, THE LOCALITY PRINCIPLE, ANALOGIES OF ESCAPE and HAUNT. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Award: for his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Calvary (University of Michigan, 1968); and his most recent, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press, 2009), which won. With his wife Rosmarie Waldrop he co-edits Burning Deck Press. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches at Brown University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Instance Press (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967985404
• ISBN-13: 978-0967985404
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,546,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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