Parallel Play [Paperback]

Stephen Burt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2006

The eagerly anticipated second collection by poet and esteemed critic Stephen Burt

Flaunting your useless knowledge has failed you again,
Though it was all they had taught you.
—from “Like a Wreck”

Consult any childhood development guide and you’ll find the term “parallel play”: when children under two are placed together, they’ll play separately but won’t interact. They are more fascinated with their immediate surroundings than with each other.

Stephen Burt’s second collection of poems, Parallel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. When there are many obstacles—overeducation, narcissism, extended adolescence, nomadic existence—how can Americans crawl out of the nursery and coexist if they increasingly have to learn to do so as adults?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This second collection is harder and terser than Burt's first collection, Popular Music (1999), and its pointed use of traditional forms gives them a spiky significance: that the choices we're given are limited, and crucial: "Win or lose,/ Such small decisions, run together, fuse/ In concentration nothing like the ease/ We seem to see in the skills you use,/ Till someone wins. Then someone else will lose." Again and again in these 50-plus lyrics, in everything from "Pierre Bonnard: Standing Nude" to "Scenes from Next Week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Burt finds beauty hemmed in on every side, with a fate that is never completely self-determined, and that poses "questions that arrange us for our roles/ In plots on TV shows, on the narrow channels/ Nobody would choose." Burt is the author of the critical study Randall Jarrell and His Age and has written for the New York Times, TLS and PW, and other journals. Operating on a more macro level, his sestina "Our History" repeats the words "evildoers," "country," "history," "poor," "being" and "government"; its juxtaposition of banal discourse with real problems feels liberating, even as it ends "I too would like to be rid of the evildoers,/ but for now this country likes its government./ What will the poor nations say, when they write our history?" The poem requires its repetitions to sound out full force, but it is what liberal democracy sounds like. (Feb.)
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Review

“Stephen Burt has found a courage I’d never imagined until I read these poems. It is the courage to expound the consolations of Terror, to declare that we are the Ancients of ourselves, already more accustomed than we know to life in the ruins. With Parallel Play, Burt becomes the Cavafy of these former United States. It will be a privilege to await the barbarians in his good company.” —Donald Revell

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (January 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974376
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974374
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,072,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write books about poetry, essays on other people's poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA. My writing has appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer, the Boston Review, and as part of the Songs from Scratch experiment at Minnesota Public Radio.

I am a Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting scrutiny of isolation, whether by need, choice, or accident, March 2, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Parallel Play (Paperback)

The term "parallel play" in childhood development refers to when two children are placed together yet play separately, without interacting. Parallel Play is an anthology of poetry reflecting on the tendency adults, lovers, friends, travelers, and others withdrawn into their personal existences, sometimes influencing one another but not necessarily acknowledging one another. The variant styles of free verse meander across the intricacies of human consciousness, even - or especially - when wholly self-absorbed. A haunting scrutiny of isolation, whether by need, choice, or accident. Over Long Island: A swept rock garden. With an enormous rake / The lines of pebbles - roofs - have been made clear: / Their parallels leave rivulets, and bare / Calm soil along one edge, the Sound. Severe, / Like any rock garden in winter; so try to make // Its scale, its thumbprint creeks and springtail lakes / Bespeak / Not how smooth stones or snowflakes look alike / But what they thought they found when they came here: / Clean sidewalks. "Freedom from want. Freedom from fear."