Singularity: Poems [Hardcover]

Greg Glazner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 1996

"[Glazner] manages to locate a redemptive grace in this world while writing from the very thick of it."—Santa Fe New Mexican

Greg Glazner's lyrical and meditative poems address the burdens, demands, and joys of life at the end of the twentieth century. Their subjects range from a self-portrait distorted by nightfall to a consideration of the place of consciousness in a universe created out of an explosion. These elegant, well-crafted poems depict the spiritual desolation of American life and act as beacons of hope in the quest for sincerity and depth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the heart of Glazner's poetry lies an effort to take pieces of language from marketing lingo, academese and technobabble and recombine them into something meaningfully whole. Glazner (whose first collection, From the Iron Chair, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1991) works often with "words made of smoke," the matter of the "unreadable, four-color features" on the back of a businessman's newspaper. Brand names occupy a stratum of his consciousness: "But driving, I'd meet the usual lane of grimaces/ remembering what I was, and the signs/ would have me, Firestone, Sun West,/ Tastee Freeze." But he consistently resists the deadening force of this "show of gloss": "It's only dailiness./ It's just the way the hours go, numbed/ and building up, the way one trickle/ from the eaves has gone on/ freezing itself back for days." There is a kind of pedantic romanticism suggested in these poems, along with discouragement. Behind the television gaze of late-20th century life is a focus on a condition he observes in a college student he meets: an "almost invisible implosion of suffering." By paying intelligent attention to his surroundings, Glazner successfully converts the dross of the quotidian, including the media, into poetry. He asks: "Isn't it all TV by now,/ the world made over as a thing/ you can eat with your eyes, calling you/ to the channel selector, the Heineken,/ the sweet, hard wax for your car?" Glazner's response is to write poems you can eat with your mind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

These introspective poems examine an "atmosphere of lights" for sources of recognition. "Singularity," for Glazner the "heart of light," is a Jungian emblem meant to convey parallels between appearance of "the lighted shapes" of matter and spirit. Terms dealing with light (clarity, radiance, sheen) illuminate "the bitter interior" of human desire. Unlike his previous book, From the Iron Chair (LJ 5/1/92), set in a landscape of the Southwest, this poetry assesses contemporary life not by "the world's indifference" but by recursive investigation of "a fortune of surfaces" as seen "in the mind's eye." Glazner has an impressionist's delight in the way "elegant, branch-fluttered light" ebbs and flows, "however/ untranslatable." This shaping process ("everything/ changed to just the forms of itself") is both the root of visual art and the basis of autobiography. Acuity of perception, Glazner believes, enables one to eliminate everything irrelevant and try to fathom "a presence among presences." Heightening appreciation of observation, these uncompromising poems try to bring into focus "everything/ the world could never let us be." For all major poetry collections.
Frank Allen, Northhampton Community Coll., Tannersville, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (November 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393039927
• ISBN-13: 978-0393039924
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,706,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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