Customer Reviews

This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series)

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The Publishers Weekly review crowding the box above is really smart and wrong. Hicok's are the best poems living in magazines this month and last year, and This Clumsy Living is really pretty evidence of it. To sandwich him between Collins and Young--two poets who really can hurt you with laughter--is to mistake style for substance. Bob Hiock has said forty more important things than either of them.

It is good to know that the words you have spent money on earn their keep, to know that when you want to read something that descibes your feelings or something you'd never bring to mind, Bob Hicok has done it for you -- like he always has. There is no better poet and everybody knows it. He can take a big idea and unravel it until the room is full of debris and there's a little shiny thing sitting in the corner -- or a small idea and wind it up into a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo. Nothing's ever dull in Bob Hicok's imaginative world. This book has about forty poems but it feels like four hundred poems. The way Hicok writes is so original it's like a lawn made of poems you have to keep watering with the hoses of your eyes and then mow it back with the lawnmower of your mind. He writes about the bad times, the just about-almost-but-not-quite-right times, his wife, something in there about a dog, cows, trees, mother, father, working class people, the real times or just as often: I made this whole thing up but now that you think of it, it couldn't have been more real -- about birds, death, people you've never heard of, rivers, deer, Bob Hicok, wolves, wind, his wife. And even though Hicok is well known as being quite a humorous writer, just as often there's beauty and wistfulness in his poetry. Like this:


Solstice: voyeur

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close
the door of summer behind them, their heads floating
on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings
changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds,
I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day
of shy midnight, they kissed like waterfalls, like stones
that have traveled a million years to touch, and emerged
hybrid, some of her lips in his words, all of his fists
opened by trust like morning glories, and I smelled green
pouring out of trees into grass, grass into below, I stood
on the moment the earth changes its mind about the sun,
when hiding begins, and raised my hand from the hill
into the shadows behind the lovers, and contemplated
their going with my skin, and listened to grass
in wind call us home like our mothers before dark.



This guy can write. And anything done well looks easy. The man is brilliant. Nobody derails language like Hicok, only to put it through this prism he carries with him, to show you how he sees things on his side, which seems obvious once you go his way around. In the process, to follow his thinking, sometimes you have to fine-tune your own thinking, but that's not so hard -- that's why we read. This book of poetry is more than worth a thousand prices. I say we are lucky, because to be breathing on this planet at the same time as Bob Hicok, to be kindly flattened by his magnitude, justifies, in my mind, at least one good reason to be alive right now.

PS --- It will not be noteworthy to most of the world, nor can he make any more of it than the world is willing to acknowledge, but one day, in my useless opinion, Bob Hicok will be named
Poet Laureate of the United States.

Length:: 0:34 Mins

Bob Hicok has a gift for taking what seems to be the average everday events--even the mundane and gritty/dirty and turns them into poetry. But he isn't just a working man's poet. He is also a very skilled craftsman of poetry who is very intellectual and aware of his world. You simply have to get this book to see his skill as in such poems as "A poem with a poem in its belly." The poem read aloud and/or scene on the page will just amaze.

And what else doesn't hurt with reading Bob Hicok? Gosh, he is often pretty darn funny! One of my favorite lines is from "My career as a director" which says: while a fire / suggests that the cylce of life is beautiful / though not energy efficient.

great collection by a great poet. hicok has a way of bringing everyday, understated occurrences and feelings to rupture. immensely talented and highly addictive. after i finished this collection i went and bought every single collection he ever put out, all of which exceeded my expectations.

also just a note, i never liked poetry until i read hicok and something about his talent, it's subtlety and almost it's meekness just wins you over. if you are a fan of franz wright, you will enjoy hicok.

The book arrived in excellent condition within the scheduled delivery time.

Thank you,

Francine Keehnel