Bruce Bond – författare

In these essays, Bruce Bond interrogates the commonly accepted notion that all poetry since modernism tends toward one of two traditions: that of a more architectural sensibility with its resistance to metaphysics, and that of a latter-day Romantic sensibility, which finds its authority in a metaphysics authenticated by the individual imagination. Poetry, whether self-consciously or not, has always thrived on the paradox of the distant in the immanent and the other in the self; as such, it is driven by both a metaphysical hunger and a resistance to metaphysical certainty. Hidden resources of being animate the language of the near, just as near things beckon from an elusive and inarticulate distance. Bond revalidates the role of poetry and, more broadly, of the poetic imagination as both models for and embodiments of a transfigurative process, an imperfectly mimetic yet ontological engendering of consciousness at the limits of a language that must—if cognizant of its psychological, ethical, and epistemological summons—honor that which lies beyond it.

In his newest collection, Blind Rain, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.Bond opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which consoles paradoxically, since it is a form of loss itself. The work includes a long meditation, ""The Return,"" that hinges on the double sense of the word ""true"" as suggesting both ""the real"" and ""the loyal,"" and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a postmodern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the world at hand. From Wake: ""One day now since my father last tried to speak, // since the outer provinces of his body shut // down like small cities when the power goes, // just the enormity of starlight to guide them // on their cold journey into dawn. I am writing // at the edge of the other half of life, the part // without my father in it; I feel the strange // sure pull of the earth I walk here, // the polish of the grass, the distance between me // and my students who look up and wait // for my first questions, knowing so little // of my life, just as I know so little of theirs, // only a poem at a time to hold us together // like children before a fire in the woods.

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape ""where it is neither day nor night / but both at once,"" where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page -- the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see.Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In My Mother's Closet, the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, ""soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand.

For the Lost Cathedral delves deeply into the human relationship with the divine and its capacity for empathy, transformation, and the tolerance of difference and doubt. Bruce Bond seeks neither to praise nor to attack institutional religions, instead choosing to explore their interactions with the inner lives of those who hold them sacred. Faith can offer comfort and security in difficult times, yet it may also create the temptation to hold to absolutes. For the Lost Cathedral examines the tensions inherent in spiritual devotion as well as the impact of such devotion on our most defining conflicts, creativities, and acts of sacrifice. In poems whose formal simplicity belies the depth of their complexity and insight, Bond explores a dialogue between the spiritual and the religious. A tour de force of emotional truth and focus, For the Lost Cathedral embodies a spirit of wonder in the face of difficulties that might otherwise appear intractable.

Blackout Starlight brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence. In Bond's telling, the lines between real and unreal, living and dead, blur together in the poet's imagination, casting an equally compassionate eye upon ""the man we see writhing in the marble"" of an uncarved statue and the son at a funeral trying to face ""the other half of life, the part / without my father in it.""Taken together, the selections in this book represent the highlights of a dazzling career in poetry and leave the reader eager for many more years of Bond's verses to come.

Bruce Bond's new collection, Words Written Against the Walls of the City, confronts problems of collectivity and individual freedom in ways that bring the historical into conjunction with the personal details of everyday lives. This luminous work approaches cities, real and symbolic, as both metaphors for and embodiments of the social self, inescapably embedded in a contemporary world and yet removed, summoned by the same technical connectivity that conspires to pull us further apart, one from another. In the end, Bond's assured verse reveals how a sense of some communal whole inspires its share of indebtedness and awe in an individual's efforts to navigate the environments that enfold us.

In Invention of the Wilderness, Bruce Bond explores the wilderness as a spiritual, psychological, and ecological realm—a territory that, depending on our tolerances and affections, calls out for order, exploitation, expansion, or preservation. Although to talk of "inventing" the wilderness seems paradoxical, the book seeks to reclaim the etymological root of "invention" as a "venturing in." To invent a wilderness is to go inward by way of attentive engagement in the natural world, to affirm and liberate imaginative expression as no mere mirror of nature, but a force of it. At times meditative and melancholic, though also vibrant and full of life, Invention of the Wilderness proposes an embodied and reflective way of being in the world.

Bruce Bond's new book of poetry, The Plural of Water, offers a trilogy of sequences that explore the relation of the unconscious—our denials, affinities, passions, and self-divisions—to our ability to perceive and negotiate the crises of our contemporary moment. Through a series of lyrics, both personal and historical, the book's sections constitute parts of an integrated whole that seeks a deeper understanding of the psychological roots of ethics: traumatic fracture, ecological holism, and the ineffable, multiple, communal dimensions of personhood, drawn to and from the dark of all we love, dread, and labor to transform.

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selvesHonest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others.  In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

In Bruce Bond’s seventh book, we see a sustained exploration of mortality and its embodiment in the consolations of beauty, most notably in music.

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Are you thinking about applying to teacher training in England?  Not sure where to start or what to expect? This is your comprehensive go-to guide with helpful information and advice to help you on this very special journey ahead! Written by experts on initial teacher training in England, this guide:

helps you understand the many different routes in to teaching provides essential information about the education sector and the different types of state schools offers advice and practice tests to pass the mandatory Professional Skills tests in numeracy and literacy gives insight about the application process and helpful tips to confidently face your interview

Everything you need to know to secure your place on a teacher training course - now in one easy accessible guide!

Are you thinking about applying to teacher training in England?  Not sure where to start or what to expect? This is your comprehensive go-to guide with helpful information and advice to help you on this very special journey ahead! Written by experts on initial teacher training in England, this guide:

helps you understand the many different routes in to teaching provides essential information about the education sector and the different types of state schools offers advice and practice tests to pass the mandatory Professional Skills tests in numeracy and literacy gives insight about the application process and helpful tips to confidently face your interview

Everything you need to know to secure your place on a teacher training course - now in one easy accessible guide!

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In the poetry collection Behemoth, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysical imagination, both in its secular and sacred forms, as something universal, endemic to consciousness, embedded in our longing to capture a lost past and stave off anxieties about the great forgetting to come. As such the book figures as both a critique and empathetic analysis of idolatry, broadly understood and equally universal, problematic as a failed strategy intent upon possession, at odds with values embedded in its symbols. Figures critical to our identity—including those associated with race, nation, and religion—become most prone to unmindful projection, fears and vulnerabilities and our subsequent potential for cruelty and exclusion. Central to the book’s inquiry is the legacy of the holocaust as something that persists, recognized or not—a critical element of cultural memory that both eludes our language and summons our need to speak.

In poems both personal and historical, The Dove of the Morning News explores conceptions of collectivity, inflected by each psyche, as a force of both connection and division.  In its look at tribalism and systemic cruelty as rooted in shame, dread, and insecurity, the book seeks a better understanding of how power needs, spurred by communities of hatred, weaponize the brain’s tendencies to think in animated figures, caricatures, erasures, or, as in the book’s mediation on vellum, texts written across the bodies of others.As a lens into contemporary life, the title sequence interrogates the vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose sense of our increasingly interwoven cultural conversation figures now as a premonition of the internet.  If his hope for the noosphere as a fulfillment of divine promise feels problematic, it nonetheless sees our globe as an organism whose long-term survival depends on the capacity of each to forge friendship across difference, to take the health and integration of the individual as emblematic of the whole.

Bruce Bond’s trilogy of sonnet sequences explores trauma and self-alienation and the power of imaginative life to heal – to reawaken with the past; to better understand its influence, both conscious and unconscious; to gain some measure of clarity, empathy, and freedom as we read the world around us.

In Therapon poets Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick engage in a dialogue of near-sonnets, both personal and cultural, that explore the unfinished, haunted, and unrepresentable nature of selfhood as best suggested and enlarged in gestures of exchange. Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this book interrogates not only our ethical relation to others as beyond the pretense of our grasp, but also the notion that otherness inhabits each of us, however individuated and misunderstood, and makes our language possible, unstable, and inexhaustibly resourceful. In this way Therapon finds in dialogue not only its medium but its fascination, a sense of setting forth in friendship, and in friendship the mercies of the strange.

Plurality and the Poetics of Self investigates the words “I” and “self” as suggestive of eight territories of meaning. Via poetry’s lens into language and its limits, Bruce Bond explores the notion of self as identity, volitional agent, ego, existential monad, subjectivity, ontological origin, soul, and transpersonal psyche.