Elegy Owed
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.
"What Hicok's getting at [in Elegy Owed] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace."—Los Angeles Times
"[A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal, starred review
When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered "Bob Hicok." Elegy Owed—Hicok's eighth book—is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and "you can never step into the same not going home again twice."
From "Notes for a time capsule":
The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocket
and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup
of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit
in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow-
robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain
with contrail above like an accent in a language
too large for my mouth. A mirror
so whoever opens the past will see themselves
in the past and fall back from their face
speaking to them across centuries or hours
or the nearnevers . . .
Bob Hicok's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hicok's poems are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter, often in sincere and heartbreaking ways. His seventh book is hefty, containing poems in which a man can chop down wind, or "feel up" silence, though mostly this book explores death, the "lit fuse trailing each of us." Yet Hicok's poems about mortality and loss take on a vibrancy of their own, with a rhythm and humor that seems to fall into place by mere, desperate momentum. Language and memory haunt him, they "never/ let the living let the dead die." His title poem opens with the statement, "in other languages/ you are beautiful mort, muerto I wish/ I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean/ were sitting in that chair playing cards/ and noticing how famous you are/ on my cell phone." The next poem, "Missing," acknowledges his tendency to spiral into a random, nonsensical whimsy that at times feels forced: "Imagination says things like that/ without knowing what they mean." "The dark is my favorite suit to wear," Hicok says, and he means it. It's with a bitter humor that he observes how "God does these things like send us halfway out/ on a rope-bridge before telling us/ He's changed His mind about rope,/ it shouldn't exist, it's not going to exist."
