Amazon.com: Here (9781564780584): C. S. Giscombe: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1994

C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in three settings, three "unlikely locations": the edges of the urban south, the edges—just beyond and just within the city&mash;of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point."

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in three settings, three "unlikely locations": the edges of the urban south, the edges—just beyond and just within the city&mash;of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Here is a powerful, understated meditation on place, ancestry and time. Establishing themes in the first poem (ironically titled after an old railway slogan, "Look Ahead-Look South"), Giscombe looks back to Birmingham, Ala., from a vantage point in the North, recalling journeys there at 12 and 28 for the funerals of his grandparents. A diffuse, open technique avoids the hazard Giscombe identifies as "aimless description" and is able to take in a great deal of material, mimicking the processes of memory. His concern with African American experience is all the more effective because he so well evokes his individual consciousness. The second, longest poem, "Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River," begins less well. There are vivid bits, like the perception of a "big eyed blank-face dash bolted to the firewall" of the poet's father's car, but passages centered on a childhood hometown seem merely anecdotal. Giscombe recovers his powers when he turns to two forebears-the late Ohio poet James Wright and Robert Service Duncanson, a black landscape painter of the mid-19th-century, seeking in them aesthetic values and an artistic heritage.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

All (facts, Stories, Chance): To Ken Mcclane
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: (blue Hole)
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: (in) 1.
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: (in) 2 . Bro D
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: (in) 3.james W
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: 1. 1947
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: 2. 1848
Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River: 3.
Blue Hole,flood Waters, Little Miami River: (outlying Areas)
Blue Hole,flood Waters, Little Miami River: (to James Wright
Blue Hole,flood Waters,little Miami River: Dayton,o. 50s/60s
Blue Hole,flood Waters,little Miami River: To James Wright
Look Ahead -- Look South: ( The 1-2-3)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (1962 At The Edge Of Town)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (1962)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (1978 Itself)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (1978, Etc)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (1978, Remembering 1962)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (3 Ideas About The Future)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (all Time)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (february 1978)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (the 70s -- Unltrasuede)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (the Future)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (the Long View)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (the Recent Past)
Look Ahead -- Look South: (very Recent Past)
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's C. S. Giscombe Page

C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. He was educated in the Dayton public and parochial schools and earned degrees in English from the State University of New York at Albany and Cornell University.

His poetry books are Prairie Style, Two Sections from Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large, and Postcards; his prose book--about Canada--is Into and Out of Dislocation.

Giscombe is the 2010 recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry (given by the African American Literature and Culture Society). Prairie Style was awarded a 2008 American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation; Giscome Road won the 1998 Carl Sandburg Prize, given by the Chicago Public Library. C. S. Giscombe's writing has also won him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Canadian Embassy. He has worked as a taxi driver, as a hospital orderly, as a railroad brakeman, and for years edited a national literary magazine (Epoch, at Cornell University). His writing has appeared in several anthologies--the Best American Poetry series, the Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Bluesprint: Black British Columbia Literature and Orature, Lyrical Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, etc.

He is a long-distance cyclist. He teaches poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Electronic Poetry Center page: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/giscombe/

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Giscombe

Interview (with Mark Nowak) at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/08/prairie-style-an-interview-with-cs-giscombe/