You Don't Miss Your Water: Poems (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary) [Paperback]

Cornelius Eady (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a small book of tremendous power and grace. In 21 poems, Eady (The Gathering of My Name) illuminates experiences evoked by his father's dying, making quick, startling leaps of connection with the precisely chosen details of a born storyteller. Like a high-wire walker moving steadily along an almost invisible tension, Eady writes with simplicity and apparent ease. As he depicts his and his mother's responses to the difficult, belittling and secretive father, a convincing and moving portrait of the three emerges. Blues, rock, pop songs and hymns give these poems titles and context, linking the vernacular with the universal. "I think that every hymn is a flare of longing, that the key to any heaven is language." Eady's joy in language engenders our trust in the music that his art has made of love and pain.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Eady, winner of the coveted Lamont award for his second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Pr., 1986), is quickly emerging as one of the most skilled and sensitive African American writers. In 21 haunting prose poems, he meditates on his father's death and black American familial realities (the unmarried mother, the girl in school with the same last name) and comes to terms with specific childhood memories. The poems are related through image, not chronology, and the tone ranges from confessional to ironic. Emotions are similarly tumultuous and conflicting. But mobility and tension, stress and stupor give this volume its prowess. It is disconcerting to see six pages of blurbs fleshing out 33 pages of poetry, but that cannot undermine this honest and heartfelt dirge, especially when the "silly boy" who (in his father's eyes) never did real work explains near the end, "They're paying me to write about your life."?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 33 pages
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press (January 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887484166
• ISBN-13: 978-0887484162
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,007,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

BIO

Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY, in 1954. He is the author of seven books of poetry; Kartunes, (Warthog Press, 1980), Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, (Ommation Press, 1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, You Don't Miss Your Water, (Henry Holt and Co., 1995), The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997), Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), nominated for the National Book Award, and Hardheaded Weather; New and Selected Poems (April 2008, Putnam), nominated for the 2008 NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature (1985), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, (1993), a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi (1992-1993), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, (1993), and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award (1994). His work appears in many journals, magazines and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000) ed. Michael S. Harper. In June 1997, an adapation of You Don't Miss Your Water was performed at the Vineyard Theatre, in New York City. In April 1999, Running Man, a music-theatre piece co-written with jazz musican Diedre Murray was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. He has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed its Poetry Center, City College. Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer's Voice, The 92nd St Y, The College of William and Mary, and Sweet Briar College. With poet Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. In January 2002, a production of Brutal Imagination (with a score by Diedre Murray) opened at the Vineyard Theatre, where and won the 2002 Oppenheimer award for the best first play by an American Playwright. At present he is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Repost from Sycamore Review Article, August 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: You Don't Miss Your Water: Poems (Paperback)

You Don't Miss Your Water, is a compact collection of twenty-one prose poems exploring his "ornery and cantankerous" father's illness and death. Beyond writing elegy, beyond "hospital deathbed" and "funeral home" poems, Eady attempts to untangle his father's less-than-angelic past--infidelities, bitterness toward a darker-skinned son, lies, secrets about a half-sister previously unknown to the family--while at the same time dealing with the uncomfortable errands of the immediate present...

Evenn while dealing with the confusion, anger and bitterness surrounding his father's death, Eady tempers these beautiful poems with honesty and affection...Throughout the book he weaves memory with the immediate discomforts of grief, writing his way clearly and without ornament through the lies and bitterness of his father's life. In doing so, Eady pulls off a fine book of poems, proving, as he closes the book, that "every hymn is a flare of longing, that the key to any heaven is language."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eady's beautifully told account of his relationship w/ dad., June 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: You Don't Miss Your Water: Poems (Paperback)

Cornelius Eady writes beautiful prose and poetry, subjects ranging from the hardships he faced while growing up to his love of dance. "You Don't Miss Your Water" is the tale of Eady exploring his past as he watches his father slowly die. Of all his published works this is the most well written and touching accounts from his personal history.