This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope--from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid--sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.
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From Publishers Weekly
A veteran literary critic, Bedient published his debut collection the apocalyptically rhetorical, sometimes chaotic and insistently sexual Candy Necklace in 1999. In this follow-up, single poems pursue elaborate jokes ("Was It [painter Frank] Stella, or Was It [the poet's Aunt] Stella?") or follow the musings and visions of Romantic and modern painters: "Corot,/ smock-whited frog prince"; "the sal-/ vadordalliance of my dreams"; and above all Jack Butler Yeats (W.B.'s brother), whose letters and canvases spark several of Bedient's poems. Most frequently Bedient combines 1990s-style collage and cut-up structures with the primal bodily interests of earlier poets like Theodore Roethke and Dylan Thomas. "Jove's Thunder but a Murmur in the Leaves" considers Apollo's "whole days with Hyacinthus" as "jack-juice/ outlaws"; "Crushed Cargo" exclaims, "Men, don't be shy. Sink your naked bodies into a tub of quartered oranges." Some of these jagged poems and series pursue exuberance to the point of glibness, turning ostensible subjects into excuses. Others, however, summon impressive shards of a personal apocalypse: "I saw the pins removed from the meat and sky... Pink scrotum nailed to the post by older boys." "When the Gods Put On Meter" (included in last year's Best American Poetry) joins outrage to subtle weeping as it recalls the last years of the speaker's mother. At very least in this sophomore effort, Bedient shows a great gift for single, striking lines.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The Violence of the Morning maintains the force of a rushing river throughout. These poems and their figures have at their center a strategy of crisis. They implode with the precision and extravagance of life, maintaining stunning levels of complexity only a consummate craft could sustain. Again and again, Cal Bedient enters the elegy in order to render anew sorrow as we have lived it. 'A death,' he writes, 'a death is not a goodbye, not shallow smaller but a larger flickering.' There is nothing that these poems disallow. Grief is filtered through the absurd, the obscene, and the impossible distances that define intimacy. Joy is achieved in the beauty and Steinian playfulness that only a mind engaged to the world can celebrate. Bedient understands that man is an animal defined by passion, frivolity, failure and rage. Rarely is language so exquisitely taken to our depths.”--Claudia Rankine
"There's no one writing like Cal Bedient. These poems are so risky and so intimately imagined: earnest, toyful, plucky, undaunted-strange, fantastic, wyrd. In these poems there is real heart and an insatiable wit as well. They are full of astonishment and desolation. To the spirit bold enough and sweet enough to have written these: I praise him. I praise him."--Lucie Brock-Broido
"Always happiest shifting tonal and emotional gears at wrenching speeds, and always honest (and gutsy) enough to let the ugliest and most unsettling faces of eros peak through the strings of his lyre, Bedient asks us, in this newest volume, to awaken yet further to the hard ancient truth of the plucked string, to the sweet and sour overtones of that plucking, to the deep fear it awakens in the listener, to the apparent jangling, apparent hooting, and the strange hope that runs its metamorphic tributary underneath."--Jorie Graham
"Bedient shows a great gift for single, striking lines. . . . Bedient is a go-to guy in poetry.”--Publishers Weekly
"Bedient’s gift for startling images and vivid language propels this book forward, reminding us that even loss and grief are temporary. . . . Bedient has given us a forceful new collection."--American Book Review
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Eh.,
By
This review is from: The Violence of the Morning (Paperback)
Cal Bedient, The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia, 2002)
There is a school of poets operating today who it wouldn't be quite right to call language poets, but who are obviously descended from the same tree. Cal Bedient is one of those poets. Sprouting from such roots can certainly have its strong points (once can't imagine one of today's mainstream poets coming up with something like the term "salvadordalliance," which alone is worth the price of admission), but it can also have its weak ones, as well (lord spare me from ever seeing another poet use the tired, and still stupid, cliché of putting open parentheses in his work and never closing them). In Bedient's latest poetic offering, the two balance themselves out, more or less. A number of the poems in this collection are amusing, well-written, and fun, but a roughly equal number simply don't seem to go anywhere. The latter doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, if you are so in command of (and so trusting of) your language that you can completely let go of meaning (as in, say, Timothy Donnelly's brilliant Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit [cf. Rev. 5-12-2005]), but it doesn't seem like Bedient ever quite gets to that threshold; his poems always want to mean something, rather than being simply about the beauty of the language. And this is the trap that so many of those evolved from the common ancestor of language poetry fall into, unfortunately. Some good stuff to be had here, and some filler and fluff as well. Still, if you stumble across it at a used bookstore or library sale, it's worth a look. ** ½
4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliance compounding brilliance,
This review is from: The Violence of the Morning (Paperback)
Late in life Calvin Bedient decided to change the trajectory of his career; he's been one of America's finest literary critics for decades, and a few years ago he came out with his first book of poetry. _Candy Necklace_ was both authoritative and innovative, and it doesn't hold a candy to _The Violence of the Morning_.It's a book populated by outlandish acts of language, nonstop creativity, brilliant humor, and powerful mourning. Many people, particularly those who think poems are only worthwhile if their emotional range is limited to grief, will be bothered by Bedient's wit and originality and playfulness. And yet Bedient's broad room can enclose grief masterfully; his two elegies, for his mother and his brother, are among the most devastating I've ever read. For the last few years, American poetry has been undergoing a kind of revolution. Mainstream poetry had set itself guidelines in which every poem had to be plainspoken, unassuming, and bland. Extravagance, beauty, and wildness re-entered our poetry with Lucie Brock-Broido's _Master Letters_, and once that door had been spread so amazingly open, many other extraordinary poets followed. Some might think Bedient is a kind of johnny-come-lately in this field, but it's important to remember that Bedient, as critic, was an early champion of Brock-Broido's work. It could be said that Bedient presided over this movement in American poetry towards sheer deliciousness. This is a book that will last. Its soundtrack includes both laughter and weeping, but the utter exhilaration that comes from reading it will have no sound but delight.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the violence of the morning,
By Ms. Pink Flamingo (Pacific Northwest USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Violence of the Morning (Paperback)
The beautiful work of depth and mere dissection of dissection. Layers and layers of knowledge and perception to create his work of art with words.
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