Landscape with Silos [Paperback]

Deborah Bogen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 18, 2006

Landscape with Silos, with its dual reference to North Dakota farmlands and the unseen missile silos beneath them, is an exercise in how submerged truth can be revealed when a poet’s talent for imagination and a slanted attention are brought to bear on what’s ordinarily represented as the whole story.

"Deb Bogen writes poetry that is naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and generous. The book brims with intelligence. And reality."—Carol Frost

"Deborah Bogen’s poems have a kind of unpretentious authority, sometimes ruefully realistic, sometimes quietly mysterious; the whole of Landscape with Silos goes to make something stronger and greater than its parts."—Jean Valentine

"Here are poems of a lively intelligence, agile, wounded, and wise. Landscape with Silos is a well-crafted, beautifully imagined, and transforming work. It is free verse that conjures form, and the poet reveals a range of mind and emotion that holds the reader entranced. This is, quite simply, a marvelous book."—Betty Adcock, Series Judge

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

DEBORAH BOGEN’s poems and reviews appear widely. Recent poetry can be found in Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Field, Margie, and Her chapbook, Living by the Children’s Cemetery, was selected by Edward Hirsch as winner of the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook Competition. She now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she runs free fiction and poetry workshops.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Texas Review Press (July 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881515931
• ISBN-13: 978-1881515937
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,558,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deborah Bogen was born in Montana, but spent a good deal of time in Garrison, North Dakota as a child. These visits to grandparents and cousins provided a landscape that continues to shape Bogen's work.

In 1968 Bogen was 18, living across the Bay from San Francisco at a time when Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were reading constantly, and when every street corner and coffee house provided a venue for poets. By 1970 she was briefly at Oberlin College, where she wrote with Stuart Friebert and David Young, but when the Kent State Massacred occurred she marched on Washington and then left college to marry a hippie and live in Bolinas, California where her intention was to raise hippie babies and green chard.

Life intervened - the need for money to raise those kids turned her into a paralegal. After the hippie marriage ended she was surprised and enchanted when she re-met her college professor teacher, Jim Bogen. They married and finished raising their joint daughters, making music, art and generally good intellectual fun in Claremont, California where Bogen began to write poetry in earnest at the ripe old age of 47 (with the terrific poet, Doug Anderson, see, The Moon Reflected Fire.) Her first chapbook was chosen by Edward Hirsch as winner of the 2002 Byline Chapbook Contest. Her first full-length collection, "Landscape with Silos", won the 2005 X J Kennedy Poetry Prize and her recent collection "Let Me Open You a Swan" won the 2009 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. Today she and her husband live, write and teach in Pittsburgh, PA. You can connect with Bogen at her website www.DeborahBogen.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars BATONS AND BARNS AND SILOS, OH MY!, June 2, 2007

By 

Scott R. Hightower (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Landscape with Silos (Paperback)

Here are poems of intellectual play; a wide range of valences drive the observations. In one, there is a quiet visitation to the past... to a childhood landscape where the U.S. built multiple missle silos. In another, a poem about baton twirling turns magically into an ars poetica. In still another, the poet mells getting a police mug shot with being a youth, standing on a coffee table, and being fitted by her kneeling grandmother for a summer dress. A poem about a barn and the constellation Orion becomes a metaphor for the reflective art of writing: "Some say the moon makes things / look strange. I think it lets us see how / strange things are, scarecrows in / their wedding clothes, the way light snows / on trees. The Bible says the sun's got / one kind of glory, the moon another. / I see best in moon-lit glory." Poem by poem, it is all about another way of seeing things. The politics of reflection gives way to the real politics of poetry! Bogen has given us a generous collection of smart poems.