The Holy Worm of Praise: Poems [Hardcover]

Philip Schultz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002

the holy worm of our tongues singing praise
our faces shining like cities our being one among many
our climbing Jacob's ladder to rock in the arms of angels
our walking here and there on the earth and looking around

Philip Schultz's work has always evoked "a brilliant cavalcade of people
and images that make you want to laugh and cry at the same time"
(Yehuda Amichai), but the poems in this new collection-his first in fifteen years--register a movement from desire, pain, and loss to sympathy, understanding, and love. In these meditations on friendship and the forgotten of our world, these elegies for the displaced and cherished dead, there is something new and wonderful-praise.
From the seemingly trivial hums and beeps of an answering machine to the painful experience of being touched by Alzheimer's, these extraordinary poems suffuse human experience with the wonder, laughter, and luminosity of life. With an intensity akin to prayer, they celebrate love--be it sexual, familial, romantic, or otherwise--in all its wonder and complexity, singing praise for what is most vulnerable, beautiful, and innocent in ourselves.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

His first in 15 years, Schultz's third collection of poems confirms this poet's calling as an elegist, whether remembering his mother ("Apartment Sale," "Nomads," "Stories"), his father ("Mr. Parsky"), or writers like Yehuda Amichai, Joseph Brodsky, John Cheever and William Dickey. The long poem that concludes the book, "Souls Over Harlem," provides a stark account of a friend who "parked on a cliff in the cold wind of the Pacific and stuck his mulatto face in a plastic bag and drank snail poison, and burned his intestines to an ash transparency." Over the course of the poem, Schultz's guilt over not being able to save his friend is interwoven with his diffidence over the gap between his lifestyle as a Hampton-izing New Yorker and the plight of so many inner-city Blacks in Harlem. The frisson of better city living is sent up in the ode "City Dogs," with "fancy over-fluffed pedigrees prattling toward pedicures, Saturday afternoon perambulations in Village runs." Schultz has tendencies toward poems that read like lineated prose ("My Friend Is Making Himself," "The Answering Machine," "Ars Poetica," "Personally") and an excessive use of weak similes, as in this schmaltzy passage from "Change," a poem that incorporates over a dozen: "Surely you've never tasted it before, lavender, like lilacs on the first fine day of May, the happiest of seasons. Now your heart is thumping like a tail." Schultz is at his best in the gritty voice of a "Prison Doctor," who bears witness to this world in all its woundedness where gold teeth are "sliced out of sleeping mouths for trophy earrings, all paranoia's graffiti pleading Doc please yank this sardine-can shaft, this mea culpa, out of my memory."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The poems in Schultz's new work his first in 15 years are prayerful, nostalgic, and elegiac in tone, the poignant record of a man escaping "the white noise of self-loathing and boomerang of self-pity." Out of his grieving for dead friends and his mother's Alzheimer's, the poet discovers spiritual peace and a capacity for love and joy, causing the "holy worm" of his tongue to sing "praise." At times, Schultz shifts into a comic surrealism, as in "Flying Dogs," where the canines "boogie-woogie" and "feel the city on their paws." He can even become hilariously funny, as in "Ars Poetica," where, on a book promotion tour, he misplaces his manuscript and appears at his reading with a leather-bound wine list. Schultz summarizes his hard-earned wisdom thus: "consider forgiveness" and "live without syntax/ or wings." This is easily one of the strongest collections of lyrics published in the last decade. Highly endorsed for all collections. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL Religion
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151006660
• ISBN-13: 978-0151006663
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,111,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, Sad Poems, January 10, 2003

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holy Worm of Praise: Poems (Hardcover)

It is always so difficult to way what makes a poem a good poem. Like all fine poems, these should be read again and again rather than explicated. Mr. Schultz writes about everyday things-- a dog's marking his territory, an answering machine, playing solitaire. He is a master of understatement. In the moving poem "Darwin, Sweeping" about an apartment superintendent, Mr. Schultz says "Bernice, his wife of fifty-one years, died last week/and that's why he's sweeping the steps, the walk, the street too." Those lines are just as poignant as Emily Dickinson's "the bustle in a house the morning after death." So many memorable lines in these poems-- how about "before Christ discovered America"? Or a mulatto who committed suicide is described as "born only half out of luck."

There are three related poems apparently written about the poet's mother, "Alzheimer's," "Nomads," and "Apartment Sale" that go straight to the heart. I read them recently while visiting my 83 year old mother as she wandered from room to room looking for something she had just lost-- and found-- and lost again.

These are indeed beautiful, sad poems.