Invisible Bride (Walt Whitman Award) [Paperback]

Tony Tost (Author)

Book Description

Series: Walt Whitman Award | Publication Date: April 2004

This book of poems is by Tony Tost, winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets.

Product Details

• Paperback: 57 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (April 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807129658
• ISBN-13: 978-0807129654
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #661,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Escaping the Tree, August 12, 2004

By 

Albright Katz "andrew" (ri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Invisible Bride: Poems (Hardcover)

Martin Heidegger writes of the poet as being able to provide for humans a picture of what Being is by making language speak the unspoken. Invisible Bride, in all it's muted exhiliration of a voice(s) both human and majestic embedded in the palpable reaches of language does just that: it shows that somehow we are stuck inside a tree trunk with arms flailing trying to describe what exists outside; the outside being the world we inhabit, but never grasp. Only a poet could do this and Tost has shown his acumen of humanity superbly by speaking the unspoken. Tost has fashioned a bridle around language in which to champion the gross richness that chooses to hide instead of reveal. He leads the reader to darkened roads and, on occasion, refreshing streams in search of what possibly exists out there. What he finds there moves both inside and out: a blind man, children, irate mothers, a twin...etc. Coaxing the reader to tear the bark and revel in the glaring particularity of what the world is, a world once concealed is given new life. Tost has brought back the gems of this world to share and remind us that there is more than one way to escape the tree in order to see for ourselves what we are missing.

12 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Clouds on a Summer Day, June 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Invisible Bride (Walt Whitman Award) (Paperback)

There is a winning gentleness and humanity to the "voice" in most of the poems in this book (so two stars instead of one), but they too often cross the line into a very soft-hearted and headed kind of pop-song sentimentality. I've seen this in many books by inexperienced younger poets these days--the assumption of a kind of deliberate naivety that allows one to appear to live in a state of constant amazement, to drift--sometimes meaningfully, sometimes not--between images, ideas and statements without really latching onto and developing anything. The method is largely random, and when something interesting is said it usually occurs from pure luck. For me, this book doesn't really stand out from the numerous other post-New York school collections by a myriad of others. The previous reviewer who called the poem's borders "cloudlike" is right on--but there's really nothing difficult or ultimately interesting about drifting around in a haze. I see little precision, discipline or intellectual force backing up these amorphously constructed parcels of prose--they're as sweet and unthreatening as cotton candy. But on a brighter note, I did like the humanity of the voice and would read another book by this author--with the hope that the "borders" might become a bit more defined and the poems more rigorously constructed.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars But for one poem, April 26, 2010

By 

DabblerArts (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Invisible Bride: Poems (Hardcover)

What happens to an award-winning book? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode? In this case it probably simply evaporates. I agree with the reviewer who says that writing is just too diffuse and vague. There are moments of brilliance, but they're fleeting, like sparks in a vapor. I've enjoyed reading it, however, because as far as this kind of stuff goes - and in the final saying, it doesn't go very far at all - it's actually not all that bad.

It seems to me that our poets work hard to write poetry in the abstract sense - and prose chunks are a great vehicle for this - and this book doesn't even have a table of contents (What, contents? How passe!) - but few bother to write memorable poems, of a definite shape, with a beginning, middle and end. There is one very, very good poem in this book, which is the only reason it has stuck in my mind, and that I have sought it out again at the public library. I can't quote it in full, and it doesn't survive in parts, but it's called "Swan of Local Colors," and it's on p.33. If you could, do look for it, rescue it, for a moment, from the stacks' oblivion.

Now if only I could convince some of our smarter young poets to return to writing poems!