Second Wind [Paperback]

David Graham (Author), Alice Fulton (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1990

David Graham's poems are wonderfully subtle. They present a quiet, polite, plain spoken appearance to casual acquaintances; but friends with an ear to hear will soon sense that—beneath the calm surface—there stirs a much darker current, urgent and powerful, one engaged by an imagination that is ripe, wild, funny, and true. These poems embody that doubleness perfectly, the feeling that our world is at once reassuringly familiar and surpassingly strange. To self, to small town, to the dust-haunted reaches of memory and universe, Second Wind gives compassionate attention; and as David Graham, that keeper of "local faith," rightly says, "any act of attention / turns to love." —Michael McFee During the first half of my life, I spent all of my summers in a small Pennsylvania town; and ever since then, it seems to me, I've been looking for a poet to give such a town a voice. It already exists in prose: Granville Hicks's marvelous portrait of Grafton, New York, Small Town. But no one I know of had caught in poetry the brutal, aimless, raw, public/private world of back-alley and choir-loft and school-yard violence; of swimming holes and attic trunks and neighbors' locked garages all aching to be touched and tested and tasted; of a place where almost everybody knows the secret vices and unexpected virtues of almost everybody else. Well, David Graham, whose work for the past half-dozen years has been a bright spot in the literary periodicals, at last with accurate speech gives us the American small town and its citizens not as they ought to be but as they are. —John Unterecker, Michigan Quarterly Review In dense, richly textured language, David Graham draws on the ancient art of scop and minstrel, juggler, storyteller, and magician, to sing sagas of small towns, boyhood, domestic life, aging. Tough-minded and lyrical, and full of canny intelligence, all his taut tales ring true. —Ronald Wallace

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Attic Which Is Not Desire
Boy Gone Haywire
Boys And Fireworks
Boys Backward And Forward
Boys On Schedule
Breaking And Entering
Common Waters: 1
Common Waters: 2
Common Waters: 3
Common Waters: 4
Common Waters: 5
Companion Of Dusk
The Day I Cannot Stop Crying
Dust Events: 1
Dust Events: 2
Dust Events: 3
Dust Events: 4
Dust Events: 5
Dust Events: 6
Dust Events: 7
Dust Events: 8
Farewell To Music: Turlough O'carolan (1670-1738)
Father Of The Man
First Snow, Wisconsin
The Fox, A Most Cat-like Dog
Guided Tour Of Pocahontas, Virginia
Hickory Fall
Jesus Never Sleeps
Kinds Of Jazz
Letter From London
Like A Television
Loons
The Mind's Eye
The Mohawk River: A Real Allegory Of Twenty Years...
Moon Walk
Mother Pills
Near Misses
Planxty Beatles
Planxty Beethoven
Planxty Charles Ives
Planxty Lee Morgan
Rough Air
Second Wind: 1. Bird Skull; A Painting By Lee Shippey
Second Wind: 2. Because Such Fingers Need To Knit...
Self-portrait As Author And Citizen
Self-portrait As Lucky Man
Self-portrait From D To G
Self-portrait With Australia
Self-portrait With Nostalgia
Self-portrait With Self-doubt
Self-portrait With Stage Fright
A Sense Of Scale
Sure
Unguided Tour Of Floyd, Virginia
The Valley Where We Live
Wedding Gift
What It Is Like
Why I Love Halloween
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

"Intelligent, hardwon, and immensely readable, *Second Wind* numbers among the finest poetry books of recent years. In the broadest sense, David Graham's theme is nothing less than mortality: how we live, die, and affect each other along the way. The book is also a beautifully complex anthem of America in its variety, as it was and is. These poems helped me to a fresh understanding of the small towns one drives through on the way to grander destinations, the posturing of adolescent boys growing up to be "men / foolish as boys but stronger," the accuracies and deceptions of our language. Although the poems' subjects are often local and familiar, their achieved ambitions are never small. . . . What's more, the book is so beautifully written that you won’t want to put it down. I seldom see language move with such grace; there are sentences one wants to reread for the sinuous music of their construction. . . . David Graham's *Second Wind* . . . succeeds in doing that difficult thing: giving pleasure as it makes us think." --Alice Fulton --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press (January 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896722112
• ISBN-13: 978-0896722118
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,132,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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