A Wandering Island [Paperback]

Karl Kirchwey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 1990 | Series: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

A survivor of the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., an old man in his garden in upstate New York, a fourteenth-century Picard glazier, a modern city-dweller repainting his front hall--the speakers in these richly textured poems reflect on the culture of their own time and contemplate the enigma of home. Here Karl Kirchwey provides the reader with a synchronous vision of the ancient and the contemporary while illustrating the paradox of geographical fixity in a world of change. The poems use the formal resources of the modern syllabic and the classic hexameter, of free verse as well as the stanza forms of Herbert and Wordsworth. Their settings encompass French and Italian Switzerland, Sicily, Greece, rural New England, Manhattan, and London. Together the poems form an atlas of significant emotional range and terrestrial color.For Allo (Sculpture from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, now in the British Museum)It is as if the wind had flayed her woolen chiton from her, yet somehow she is clothed: neither in flesh nor stone. Has she been stripped by time, then, or the fury of her own movement? It starts up by her throat: a Y of sinuous folds descends between her breasts; then, magnified as roses are in fabric in a light summer dress, so that the lower blossoms are actually larger than those above, or as waves find their murderous amplitude through long movement at sea alone, or thought does, these too counter their direction, involving the whole body in their torque of contrary motion, so that the hem tosses in restless troughs, a single flange of vengeance floating in the way the mind does, and condemns itself in solitude.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ambulance
Archaic Lament: At Delphi
Archaic Lament: Riace Bronze
Avalanche Barriers, Erstfeld
The Balsam Cut With Steel
Bells Above Bretaye
The Bliss Of Solitude
A Carnival Letter
Colloque Sentimental
The Color Known As Provincetown
The Diva's First Song (white's Hotel, London)
The Diva's Second Song
Drayton Gardens, S.w. 10
Eden Like This
Figures Before Sleep: Hat Blocks In Loco
Figures Before Sleep: Lost Wax
For Aello
Gangaridae
The Geographer's Line
German Nudists, Kalamaki, Crete
Gioia Tirrena
House Lights Down
Idyll, Morse Road, Sudbury, Massachusetts
In Helvetia
In Passing
An Irish Girl On The Lake Of Geneva
John Howland's Lyric
Medon On Lemnos
Museum Of Holography
Nightfall, Via Alessi, Catania
The Rigors Of Dusk
Summer Snow
These Four Rivers
Two Legends Of Salvation: Lebanon Springs
Two Legends Of Salvation: Our Lady Of Lourdes
A Wandering Island
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (February 21, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691014817
• ISBN-13: 978-0691014814
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,678,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Over-intellectual, pedantic, January 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Wandering Island (Paperback)

Karl Kirchwey's poems have very little to do with the real world, with no remarkable immediacy whatsoever. These are poems of a brain without a body, arcane, sifting through history, tenuous.

Reading these poems, one is not awed, or moved by the awesome immediacy of language, or even inspired. It is work, like panning for gold, to find bits of language which aren't weighted down with demonstrations of irrelevant pedegogical flotsam.

Why do poets insist on being *difficult* in order to have a worthy 'career' in academia? Here's another example of a poseur, striving to be well known, producing over-intellectual linguistic balderdash instead of honest, penetrating, insightful, direct vision. I suppose they loved him at Yale.