Many Circles collects the best of Goldbarth's three earlier essay collections, along with several new pieces. Goldbarth, whom Joyce Carol Oates has called "a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart," weaves through an array of fascinating topics (including alien life, Jewish history, pop culture, ancient and recent events, and quantum physics) to explore the greater questions of our existence and our universe. Each essay, in language and topic, is a rich and extraordinary adventure, full of surprise and epiphany. As Robert Atwan, editor of The Best American Essays series, has noted: "Theses essays are a whole new breed . . . Goldbarth has spliced strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene—and the results are miraculous."
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Goldbarth's virtuosic essays bob and weave throughout this delightful, even brilliant, collection. Well worth reading and rereading, some of these pieces from the past 21 years were published in journals such as the Georgia Review and Parnassus and in previous books. Goldbarth (Dark Waves and Light Matter), also a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet, synthesizes isolated facts and sweeping concepts, locating himself within the general "we" even as he writes in first person and discusses exceptional individuals. In the title essay, the author circles around several topicsincluding Mayan archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens's troubles at an excavation and the dissolution of Goldbarth's friends' marriage in the face of repressed memory treatmentexploring accidental, analytic and associative connections. Goldbarth's playful and dissonant style ranges in one essay from witty ("But if the subject is shaky footing, let's make it literal for a while") to abrupt ("He caught her with her tongue up her therapist's ass, he said") to florid ("So tell me: who is this man here, doing a whoop-whoop whirl of dervish dance steps in that tumble of fretwork stone?") to critical ("A lesson: the authority of two-bit village big shots is as fervent to keep itself whole and unchallenged as is, for example, that of reigning academic theorists"). No subject falls outside Goldbarth's interest, from the planet Mars to Marie Curie to his own grandfather. While many of these essays aren't autobiographical, they are nonetheless deeply felt. Goldbarth's fresh prose and expansive content are helping reconfigure the essay as a form.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Poet and essayist Goldbarth (Troubled Lovers in History: A Sequence of Poems; Beyond: Poems) is known for his eclectic, circuitous style. In one essay, you may find his father painting a paint-by-number scene, exotic dancers spinning on a wheel, Jesus acting as the son of man, cave art found in Argentina, walking to Hebrew school, and recollections of a Jorge Luis Borges story. This anthology collects 12 essays from the past 21 years of his work, augmented by some new material. Always concerned with the human condition, the author interweaves personal experiences with intellectual ideas and current events with esoteric references to the past making love, the necessity of history, a gang member forced into a boiling bath, or Leonardo da Vinci waiting at the hospital for a centenarian to die, all find their way into Goldbarth's ranging perspective. A rich and intriguing mix for public and academic libraries with strong literary collections. Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Circling The Years,
By A Customer
This review is from: Many Circles (Paperback)
This collected essays edition of Goldbarth's work provides new readers with an oppurtunity to read a number of essays from the long out of print A Sympathy of Souls and Great Topics of the World. Perhaps what's most interesting about the collection is that one can see Goldbarth becoming more comfortable with the essay as a form, working out the differences between essays and poems over the course of the early essays (from Souls and Great Topics) before hitting his stride with the title essay. If you've read his last essay collection, Dark Waves and Light Matter, Many Circles will not dissapoint.
0 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad Move,
By A Customer
This review is from: Many Circles (Paperback)
From the publisher that brought us John D'Agata's Halls of Fame comes another collection of experimental essays. Unfortunately this one seems to have been put together quickly in order to rid on the coat-tails of D'Agata's much more original, daring collection. Many Circles in a collection of previously published material that merely recycles a lot of old ticks from a very tired writer. Goldbarth is known for his wonderful, quirky poetry. I'd leave the essay writing to others.
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