Through One Tear: Poems [Hardcover]

Edward Nobles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1997

The poems in Through One Tear range across social and historical subjects, through the consequences of love, to spiritual integrity and quest. Some could be called magical realism. Others display a searing black humor. Many investigate the inner mysteries of the self head-on. The central poem, "Loss, " interweaves a wide range of crystallized historical and personal moments into a powerful monument of love, loss, suffering, and wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The haunted narrator of Nobles's first book of poems inhabits a weird, nightmarish universe, "a place/ where no one belongs." Yet this unreal world oddly mirrors the real one. In "Nuclear Winter," for example, everything in the polluted environment is transformed into the color blue, and Nobles's persona loses himself in a horrid "dream of multiple dreams." In "Daily Dilemma," like a prisoner in Dante's Inferno, he is forced to eat filth. He even slits his eye like a character from Dali's films and later watches his own skull fall from its body, with his author's pen still behind the ear! Thus, the central theme of this work is loss?of innocence, love, and order, as shown in the long poem entitled "Loss." In the end, the narrator goes home, "but home was gone." In these powerful and poignant utterances, one learns and believes that "mourning is a thread of common life." Recommended for larger collection.?Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Through One Tear by Edward Nobles was selected by The National Book Critics Circle as a NOTABLE BOOK for 1997. -- Review

Through One Tear is an ambitious book. It is greater than the sum of its parts, and those parts are formidable. The book's centerpiece is the single poem, Loss, a multinarrative, multivoiced, rhetorically fragmented, beautifully agonized poem . . . It is a comprehensive gathering of the book's primary concerns, a dark intricate rush of troubled waters. It, like the book entire, is a tour-de-force. -- Quarterly West, 1998

After So Many Years, A First Love
Aquarium Night
Architectural Digest
Classroom
The Current Cinema
Daily Dilemma
The God Of Fish
The Habit Of Perfection: The First Of Five
A Hat Upon The City
Hearing Them
The Hieratic Head Of Pound
Inside Plastic
Loss
Lost In Art Weather (far From Arles)
Metamorphic
More Than Centuries
New Moon
No Hope When
The Non-naturals: There Are Seven
Nostalgia For The Road To Salvation
Nuclear Winter
On The Head Of A Pin
Popular Mechanics
Prayer For Thaw
The Rise And Fall
Smoking (with Duchamp)
Solitary Union
Thorn Of Light
Through One Tear
Through The Desert
To America's Shore
Toward An Open Window
Warehouse
A Way Of Life
The Whole World
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

In these powerful and poignant utterances, one learns and believes that 'mourning is a thread of common life.' Recommended . . . . -- Library Journal, October 1997

The poems in this first book come to us, like those of Wallace Stevens, filled with conundrum. Nobles is a master at transforming the ordinary by viewing it from alternating angles or through small slits, and always at a cool remove. Sometimes dream states blink back and forth until they too accumulate in clear vision. Nobles gives us the world from both sides of every window; he takes us to a height so we can look down and see ourselves looking up. His keen intelligence keeps the frequent metamorphosis from becoming dizzying or contrived. This looking and re-looking is clearly in the service of precision: what Nobles ultimately achieve is an exact and moving expression of how it is to be human at this particular historical moment. And he does it without resorting to the logarithm of easy sentiment or inconsequential personal details. He is obviously aware, as he writes in Through the Desert, that "a fine line means so much." -- Boston Review, June 1997

[An] original and remarkable first book . . . . Nobles is probably the only poet who can begin a poem, "I pull her panties to the floor" and, by the end, jump to a Duchamplike magnified image of a "red-yellow/marble" that "rolls through the dust and stops at a penny. . . ." Unlike many poets writing today, Nobles turns away from narrative. His surrealism is the mind's throwing the dice of matter. . Nobles brilliantly connects . . . surrealism with a vision of history. -- American Book Review, June 1998

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 87 pages
• Publisher: Persea Books; 1st edition (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892552271
• ISBN-13: 978-0892552276
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 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: #5,150,831 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strongly recommended for books originality, September 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Through One Tear: Poems (Hardcover)

I discovered Edward Nobles' book "Through One Tear" on a list of Notable Books selected by the National Book Critics Circle. Every once in a while a book comes along to change the way we look at a journey and leave one changed. The long poem "Loss" is the best long poem I have read since T.S,.Eliot's "The Waste Land." It may be presumptuous to say so, but I think it is better. "Through One Tear is the most exciting book of poetry published in a long, long time. I strongly recommend it to anyone wishing to experience poetry working at its peak.