Brother Fire
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this rich collection, W. S. Di Piero seeks the spirit and substance of illumination in all its forms. He finds meaning, or shows us how we attempt to do so, in the rituals and events that mark our year–the Fourth of July, Halloween, New Year’s Eve–and in the ordinary activities of mowing, dancing, drinking, trying to stay warm. “The Kiss” recounts how, as a young man, the poet was not called to the priesthood; in “Prayer Meeting,” he recalls watching his mother iron, with her “hopeless routine longing,” and declares, “I wanted more than what I prayed for.”
For all their simplicity, Di Piero’s direct, often conversational turns of phrase reveal a world aflame with troubles, with love, with surprising lyrical epiphanies.
Didn’t You Say Desire Is
like the elephant fog
shredded north
a white sun going down
Bessemers fired
through clouds horizoned
on my dog-eared stack
It feels good and right
to waste earnest hours
of an early evening’s
daylight saving time
in uncertainty and want
these cranky climates
changing in us while we
haven’t started dinner yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fresh wedding cakes in bakery windows, panties on clothes lines, Howdy Doody on television all appear within sleek, minimally punctuated, fast-moving lines in Di Piero's eighth collection. But for all of their grounding in the real, these works push away from it with the force of their own craft; the poems are pitched toward the transformation of the external and ephemeral to the internal and fixed: "I want to keep/ the shadow late sunlight/ franks on the table, this gray/ unstable print of me,/ memento, darkening/ with time, gauntly complete." The knowledge that heightened perception and articulation can never be enough dominates the book: "I/ felt delivered, unfinished,/ to bright solid scenes/ melting through me as I/ streamed helpless into them." Nearly 40 poems in three unnamed sections register everything from "The Fifties" and "Girl Found in the Woods" to "Ortlieb's Uptown Taproom" and "Suzanne on the Sofa." The book begins with an invocation of a fraternity of elements (from which the title is drawn), and ends in "dreadful freshness and want,/ ...a stilted fountain of prayer/ rising in our throat." What's in between seeks a faith in description, even as it remains inadequate to the world's "more vexing messages." The poet's persistence from within that knowledge becomes the book's center, fuguing around the world as he knows it, "vagrant still doubtful." (Nov.)
