In his second collection of poems, Adam Kirsch examines the world we live in now, a world in which the dangers of history have invaded the pleasures of private life. His connected poems use traditional forms to create a free, contemporary music amidst the omens of the post-September 11 world. Mr. Kirsch is at home with all the strange juxtapositions of our culture: he can celebrate "the paradisal sighs" of Jane Birkin and still hear the "angelic harmonies" of Handel's Messiah; he can observe military jets trailing "stripes of smoke" and find the quiet of a synagogue in Queens. Invasions is a moving and highly personal collection, Mr. Kirsch's exploration of what he calls, with fear and hope, "the magically real."
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From Publishers Weekly
Through reviews in the New Yorker, the New Republic and elsewhere, Kirsch (The Wounded Surgeon) has fast become one of the country's best-known poetry critics, advocating self-control, formal mastery, rational argument and attention to the past, and praising poets from T.S. Eliot to Anthony Hecht to Frederick Seidel. Kirsch's first book of poems struck many readers as apprentice work: this second effort—composed almost entirely of 16-line sonnets (like George Meredith's)—comes far closer to the ideals set forth in his prose. Kirsch's subjects include New York City (where he lives) before and after 9/11; other poets (Wordsworth, Larkin, Palgrave's Golden Treasury); hip-hop's favorite furrier; a pet adoption booth; and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Kirsch views with grim and complicated regret: jet contrails at JFK airport, in one powerful sonnet, are advertisements in the sky/ For a new kind of combat that requires/ Us only not to notice and ask why. An interlude of stanzaic poems built around lines from the medieval writer Boethius saves the book from formal monotony and excess topicality. These efforts—highbrow deliberation in verse—are a lot like Hecht, and good enough to stand, poem by poem, on their own. (Apr.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In his readable and intelligent second collection, Kirsch is as formally careful and as witty as he was in his prizewinning debut, The Thousand Wells (2002). Fortunately, he is also even less personal—he would rather show off his “chops” than his wounds—and even more topical. All the poems, except for eight placed in the center of the book that react to passages in Boethius’ sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, consist of four quatrains, rhymed (loosely) ABAB, run together to make up 16-line iambic pentameter paragraphs. Nearly every paragraph comments on a phenomenon, common or special, of urban life, with New York usually the city in question. Kirsch has a keen eye for contradiction and the knack for visualization to make discrepancies vivid, so that his sad socioreligious observations about a sing-along Messiah in Los Angeles’ Disney Hall, and the even sadder lesson in social insecurity represented by the juxtaposed big windows and exterior concrete barriers of a Jewish community center, are deeply affecting. --Ray Olson
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Meaningful, superbly crafted, immensely enjoyable,
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This review is from: Invasions: New Poems (Ivan R. Dee Paperback Original) (Paperback)
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, I encounter several hundred new books of poetry each month. I can attest to the fact that a very slim few ever attain the level of accomplishment to be found in this book, its author's second collection of poetry (he is also the author of two books of poetry criticism). Highly recommended!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging and Fun,
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This review is from: Invasions: New Poems (Ivan R. Dee Paperback Original) (Paperback)
I've liked Adam Kirsch since buying The Thousand Wells a few years ago. I mean "liked" in the way that you like a friend. There's much to admire, and even his flaws are interesting. Kirsch writes with traditional meter and rhyme, an ambitious undertaking when the world is awash in lazy free verse. Sometimes his earlier efforts were a bit stilted, the meter too sing-song, the rhyme too pedestrian. But Invasions shows a growing mastery of the art, and happily, as Kirsch's poetic technique has matured and deepened, he feels free to be himself, to be playful, and to use the poetic form to express his own voice. Highly recommended.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kirsch gets it right,
By ioBuddha (Vermont) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Invasions: New Poems (Ivan R. Dee Paperback Original) (Paperback)
I just finished Kirsch's book on confessional poets "Wounded Surgeon", so I had to see what his poetry was like... very thought out style, no wasted words. It's nice to read contemporary poetry with substance.
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