Violence of the Morning

CAL BEDIENT is the author of several books, including a previous collection of poems, Candy Necklace, and works of criticism such as He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist and In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Violence of the Morning maintains the force of a rushing river throughout. These poems and their figures have at their center a strategy of crisis. They implode with the precision and extravagance of life, maintaining stunning levels of complexity only a consummate craft could sustain. Again and again, Cal Bedient enters the elegy in order to render anew sorrow as we have lived it. 'A death,' he writes, 'a death is not a goodbye, not shallow smaller but a larger flickering.' There is nothing that these poems disallow. Grief is filtered through the absurd, the obscene, and the impossible distances that define intimacy. Joy is achieved in the beauty and Steinian playfulness that only a mind engaged to the world can celebrate. Bedient understands that man is an animal defined by passion, frivolity, failure and rage. Rarely is language so exquisitely taken to our depths.