Albert Goldbarth - Böcker

Focusing with equal energy at the imposing sky and at our own home planet, Albert Goldbarth moves from hosannah-choiring angels to a single peach pit glistening on the tongue of Madame Renoir, from the sweep of the earth's ecocycles to the particles of quantum physics.In these poems surgeons, lovers, astronauts, psychiatrists, and priests embark on the same far journey, traveling into the universe of what it means to be human, exploring "how the world works." Here, the ancient Egyptian afterlife and the atrocities of the 10 o'clock news, the realm of guacamole chip dip and the life of Rembrandt mix toward one cohesive vision.

When Albert Goldbarth's Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, the citation called it "a dazzling, delirious book as full of zest and joy as it is prodigal in the sweep of its learning and the warmth of its affections: Goldbarth is manna in the desert, a cure for what ails our poetry". Now Goldbarth offers Across the Layers: Poems Old and New, which allows the poet to reconsider recent and previously published work in a continuum of wide stylistic variety and yet deep unifying concerns.The collection opens with his book-length "novel-poem" Different Fleshes, a serious romp through smalltown Texas and gay Paree in the twenties, and closes with the "essay-poem" "Dual", a study of both intimate filial affections and the risk-taking photographs of Diane Arbus. Between these two major works are poems that range from a twelve-line lyric meditation on loss and continuity to a thirty-four-page narrative adventure of life on the road with a band of antique radio collectors; from poems in autobiographical voice to a chorale spoken by Walt Whitman's imagined children; from the world of Miss Aluminum Siding to the rigorous vision of Georgia O'Keeffe; from an antic litany of comic-book superheroes to a dark look at government espionage on the homefront.Connecting and further vivifying this surface expanse are shared explorations in the uses of memory, in the bittersweet sounding of elegy, and in patterns and balances on the cosmic scale as registered by small moments of pleasure and pain twinned in individual lives.

When Albert Goldbarth's Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, the citation called it "a dazzling, delirious book as full of zest and joy as it is prodigal in the sweep of its learning and the warmth of its affections: Goldbarth is manna in the desert, a cure for what ails our poetry". Now Goldbarth offers Across the Layers: Poems Old and New, which allows the poet to reconsider recent and previously published work in a continuum of wide stylistic variety and yet deep unifying concerns.The collection opens with his book-length "novel-poem" Different Fleshes, a serious romp through smalltown Texas and gay Paree in the twenties, and closes with the "essay-poem" "Dual", a study of both intimate filial affections and the risk-taking photographs of Diane Arbus. Between these two major works are poems that range from a twelve-line lyric meditation on loss and continuity to a thirty-four-page narrative adventure of life on the road with a band of antique radio collectors; from poems in autobiographical voice to a chorale spoken by Walt Whitman's imagined children; from the world of Miss Aluminum Siding to the rigorous vision of Georgia O'Keeffe; from an antic litany of comic-book superheroes to a dark look at government espionage on the homefront.Connecting and further vivifying this surface expanse are shared explorations in the uses of memory, in the bittersweet sounding of elegy, and in patterns and balances on the cosmic scale as registered by small moments of pleasure and pain twinned in individual lives.

The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous "technology culture," even as it's a time when the urge to memorialize the past—to sing elegiacally—seems more important than ever.Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in time: the ever-shifting "now."

For five decades Albert Goldbarth has been astonishing readers with the erudition, wit, lyric invention, wisdom, and depthless humanity of his prolific writing. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry twice and has been awarded the Mark Twain Prize for humour in poetry, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honours.He mixes complex ideas, wildly dissimilar objects and facts, detailed descriptions, striking lyricism, puns, coinages, and jargons. In his review in Slant, Eric McHenry wrote, "in spite of this omnivorousness, the poems aren't just big maximalist messes. Synthesis is Goldbarth's goal and his gift".

These poems are set in, or arise from, the past but, with Goldbarth's characteristic precision, insight, and narrative intelligence, springboard into a conjunction of thought and heart that reminds readers that the core of being human has never changed. Against an era and a society that prostrates itself before technology, this book calls readers to remember Eternity--capital intended--and "believes we can't be done with lingering about, and perhaps learning from, what's come before.

Albert Goldbarth’s new collection is a community of poems that makes room for other voices than the autobiographical “I”: some fantastical, some historical/celebrity, some the neighbours down the block.The poems themselves offer a rich spectrum of possibilities, from the comic to the grievous, from a poem of five lines to a poem of six pages, but all presented by a poet whose broad understanding of history and of a wide range of character types allows him to people his writing with everyone from presidents to prostitutes, and from ancient mythmakers to contemporary celebrities - all the while remaining present as a smart and earnest voice.