Cal Bedient - Böcker

Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossãand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope—from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere the language is outrageously wet and vivid—sliced orange language. Though the poems often take the form of couplets, quatrains, or some other repeatable structure, the results are daringly unexpected, irrational, compelling, astonishingly beautiful, and moving.

The poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient’s fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us.First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.