Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected poems |
|
|
|
| Title: | Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected poems |
| Author: | W. D. Ehrhart |
| Publisher: | Adastra Press |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 30 November, 1999 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0938566822 / 9780938566823 |
| List Price: | $20.00 |
| Amazon Price: | $20.00 |
|
This book is also available, brand-new, from 3rd-party marketplace sellers at Amazon.com, from $20.00.
|
The HTML code below can be pasted onto your web-site, your MySpace page, or blog - or any number of similar places - to create a link to this page:
If, instead of a text link, you'd like to create a link to this page which will display the book cover, if it's available, then the code below will do exactly that:
Check for the same book at these other US book sites:
• [ Abebooks ]
• [ Alibris ]
• [ Barnes & Noble ]
• [ Half.com ]
• [ Powells ]
… or check UK bookstores
|
Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
Thirty years of Ehrhart's poetry has been selected from 12 previous collections, along with a section of older poems never before published in earlier books, culminating in a section of two dozen new poems. PUBCOMMENTS: Ehrhart has been Adastra Press' best selling author. We have published the following poetry titles by Ehrhart from 1981-1999: Matters of the Heart (1981, limited edition, out of print); The Outer Banks & Other Poems (1984, currently in its 4th printing); Winter Bells (1988, limited edition, out of print); The Distance We Travel ( 1993, currently in its 2nd printing); Mostly Nothing Happens (1996, limited edition). BACKCOVER: Welded in the fires of Vietnam, these strong, sure, memorable poems encompass "that green land/I blackened with my shadow" and love, family, and supple lyrics like "The Lotus Cutters of H Ty" and "The Way Light Bends." The clarity of vision and depth of feelings in these pages will enhance Bill Ehrhart's standing as a major voice of his generation.-Daniel Hoffman A hunger for honesty and a charged lyricism have always made Bill Ehrhart's poetry remarkably his own. Though he's best known for his Vietnam War poems, his Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems includes many lovely poems not about Vietnam. This book deserves serious recognition.-John Balaban Bill Ehrhart is a wonderful poet, a force of nature, a conscience that won't let us off the hook. His writing is not the fashionable embroidery that these days too often passes for poetry. There are neither ready-made emotions nor ready-made answers here, only authentic experience, transmitted indelibly by Ehrhart's craft and art. Anyone who can read this book without tears would be well-advised to go back and learn again how to read, and how to live.-Philip Appleman W.D. Ehrhart's Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems is a moving record of how Vietnam hurt him into poetry, and into a moral vision that's as kindred with ambiguity as it is intolerant of sham. It is clear-spoken, angry, complicitous, obsessive and, finally, a long journey toward love and compassion. I'm full of admiration for his achievement.-Stephen Dunn AUTHORBIO: W. D. Ehrhart was born in 1948 and grew up in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, he has worked as a merchant seaman, laborer, journalist, and teacher, among other occupations, and has been Visiting Professor of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a writer-in-residence for the National Writer's Voice Project of the YMCA of the USA. The recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for poetry and fellowships in both poetry and prose from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he is currently a research fellow in American Studies, University of Wales at Swansea, United Kingdom. This is his sixth title from Adastra. Ehrhart lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.
|
Other Items You May Enjoy:
Browse Books From These Related Subjects:
Customer Reviews:
• The Bruise To The Heart
26 October, 2004
All these years after Vietnam Ehrhart cannot let go. Yes he goes other places: love of wife and child, memories of childhood friends and the ever unresolved situation with parents. Work, and lack of it, career and setbacks are here too, also the awareness of age as friends suffer heart attacks, as the sense of "last time" invades visits, as old places of the heart vanish. All of it presented with Erhart's deceptive simplicity, his matter of fact voice. But Vietnam, oh Vietnam. He sucks the broken tooth of remorse. Reveals the horror lurking outside the circle of his personal fire. Suddenly it reaches in, a paw touching the present: Guatamala, Bagdad, or just a street corner in Philadelphia. And he condemns it looking, hoping for justice, like a child who has been told that last lie which reveals truth. He eschews excuse for himself as an adult who could have said that one soothing word that can no longer be said. One who looks upon his thoughtless childhood cruelties and rues. He cannot help touching the sore spot. He cannot forgive himself, even though others forgive him. And so for any reader swimming along in the poetic mind this is an examination of conscience.
Ehrhart is not an academic poet, nor does his skill sparkle. Not as given to delicate images as fellow Vietnam poet Balaban, he nevertheless has some interesting pieces of wordwork in this anthology of often narrative lyrics. His diction is the diction of polite discourse. His familiarity with traditional poetry shows at times in congruent images and themes. For me, this is the work of an authentic poet. It shows why we need poetry.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Utterly Honest, Startlingly Graceful, Potently Poignant
18 November, 1999
The poetry of W.D. Ehrhart is chiselled from the granite of raw experience. He closes his eyes to nothing, and his honesty carves verse which is spare and direct yet elegant-also often melodic and lyrical. His words pierce the heart like a steel-tipped arrow. Although best known for his meditations on and recollections of the war in Vietnam, here we experience a full range of life: his first French kiss; his dropping off of his daughter at school; his jogging through Chicago and Philadelphia; his cats; his hopes, his fears, and his joys. Ehrhart's words haunt. They reverberate in one's brain and invite rereading. Don't miss this retrospective of a voice pure as a midnight cry of love and pain.
- Amazon Customer Review
|
