Gospel Night
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
"Waters's elegant language suggests that there is grace to be found in facing and speaking of our sorrows. . . . His use of humor creates a tension between the profane and the sublime."—Arts & Letters
Among the survivors of the Donner
Party—idiom's black sense of humor—
Who developed a secret taste for flesh
Flaked between the fluted bones of the wrist?
In his tenth poetry collection, Michael Waters tackles the dual (and dueling) natures of our humanity: sin and transgression, isolation and atrocity, love and darkness, and the desire for a language that can illuminate such ordinary yet disturbing spaces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Serious passions, homages and memories, scenes described with anger or affection, crop up throughout this 10th volume from the New Jersey based Waters (Darling Vulgarity), whose string of honors stretches back to the 1970s. Waters excels at stark-eyed, honest elegies for an influential teacher who killed himself; for Johnny Cash; and for the poet's own father all rendered in the strong free verse that is Waters's signature. Travel poems visit Costa Rica, Malta, and where Waters's wife grew up, Romania. The austerity of her childhood informs the heartbreaking "Beloved," where Mihaela, in her teens, reads Ethan Frome. She reappears in his poems of erotic love, which at their best move outward from the human body to the natural world, "To bluebells, foxglove, tawny daylilies / Ink-dry ampoule, spongy stylus, blunt nib/ That waxed ecstatic for the Beloved!" Waters finds self-confidence in such scenes, such symbols; there are also "swollen, blackened, almost/ Otherworldly cherries./ Their bleached pits will light our path." He is a poet of detail, but also one of directness, pursuing strong feeling wherever it dives or climbs.
