Work Life: New Poems [Paperback]

Paul Kane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2007

“Always an elegist, in the Vergilian mode, Kane touches greatness here in the beautiful poignance of 'Third Parent,' a farewell to his late mother-in-law. Only a handful of American poems in the last few decades perform the work of mourning so eloquently. Kane is a meditative poet resigned to a kind of faithless faith that longs for a transcendence not available to it.”—Harold Bloom

Paul Kane writes poems of heartbreaking beauty. Cerebral and emotional in equal measure, Work Life contains his most personal lyrics.

A recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Paul Kane teaches at Vassar College.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Kane's big third collection presents poems as well crafted as any these days, as well as a wonderfully appealing persona. His poetic voice is modest, reporting ruminatively rather than solipsistically within the flow of personal experience. There's no missing his intelligence--or his cultivation. "Psyche," the long poem at this book's center, attests to his strengths rather magnificently. It springboards from an encounter with a butterfly (think of the famous, unfortunately faked, photo of Whitman and a butterfly) into a long consideration of consciousness, of the soul. It is set off by recollection of Apuleius' account in The Golden Ass of the legend of Psyche's metamorphosis into a deity and powered by a train of associations with works of art and literature that returns to the actual butterfly and its life cycle before arriving at a restorative epiphany. Perhaps Coleridge, were he with us now, would write such a poem. The shorter poems in the book's four other parts are animated by the mythical, the elegiac, the sociological, and the theological imaginations, respectively. Each is eminently rereadable. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Paul Kane is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Farther Shore and Drowned Lands. He has written a critical study of Australian poetry and edited an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poems. He has won fellowships from the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been awarded Fulbright and Mellon Grants. He teaches at Vassar College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Turtle Point Press (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933527072
• ISBN-13: 978-1933527079
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,549,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Kane teaches at Vassar College and lives in Warwick, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Of Intellect and Heart, May 11, 2010

By 

Andrew K. Quan (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Work Life: New Poems (Paperback)

Poetry is mostly undercover these days, so I think it's interesting how you stumble across a book. I happened to be at a reading in Glebe in Sydney, Australia where three poets had been invited to read, Robert Gray, Kevin Hart, and Paul Kane. Kane was the poet that I hadn't heard of but I found his reading engaging, both lyrical and light-hearted, and I decided to give his book a try -

which is one of those great strokes of luck, when you find a poet who you like enough to vow to search down his or her other books, and whose work you really, really like. While the voice is consistent, I like the range of subjects treated in 5 sections: the forbidding and political first, the elegies of the second, the long poem "psyche" in the third, nostalgia and teenage years and the hilarious two-liners in the fourth, and a final section that gathers together religious imagery and myth.

Kane's intellect and wisdom is evident, as is the breadth of his life experience: they manifest in lines that are clear and accessible and at the same time complex in idea. I like that I don't have immediate comprehension of "Psyche" or some of the other poems - that I'll have to work at them, faced with intelligence greater than mine. At the same time, I marvel at how he takes a few plain words and transforms them with poetic ability to something magical: "What are we to ask of a shadow? / At noon, night flickers around us / as we walk in the cold sun's light." ('The Night Heron'). I find this simple, graceful and bloody beautiful. And though I'm perhaps making Kane sound like an intellectual poet, his work is full of feeling as well, a tenderness that in lesser hands would come off as sentimental, but I found resonant and touching. "What do I owe / the past", he writes in 'Third Parent', "except to settle the accounts / I bring into the present as my special sorrow?"