Earthling
Poems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Earthling confronts our deepest fears in clear and haunting language, from "a poet of extraordinary gifts" (American Academy of Arts and Letters).
"Earthling" is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With great clarity, critic and poet Longenbach (The Virtues of Poetry) asks readers of his latest collection to "Imagine you've been in love forever, since before you were born." The speaker in this text inhabits dual planes of metaphor and reality, and travels across great spans of time; he may take the shape of a crocodile one moment, then become a small child hiding underneath a table in the next. Shape-shifting and the mutability of the natural world are among Longenbach's central themes "it's hard remaining human in the forest." Objects and elements disappear, only to return again, startling as a cardinal landing on a branch "without dislodging a single flake" of snow. Longenbach's poems are replete with symbolism; lutes and suitcases recur, standing in for time and distance, at once classical and contemporary. Throughout, the heart remains a mysterious teacher: ask it something and, "like a good physician," it will elect "to keep silent, leaving me to answer for myself." By the end of the book, Longenbach has made a moving case for love's power to sustain us: "when you love one thing deeply, a person, a place/ Ultimately you love them all." Longenbach's language remains sparse, calm, and graceful even as his poems confront the finiteness of individual human lives.
