Keith Waldrop – författare

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences - "Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius" - in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop''s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

One of the unheralded masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, Light While There Is Light is acclaimed poet Keith Waldrop''s autobiographical novel about the myriad ghosts left behind by his family

Born to a deeply religious mother, the narrator and his siblings are led across the US as she searches for the "right" religious sect—a trip that ends with her speaking in tongues, and finally her total isolation. But no synopsis can do justice to the beauty of Keith Waldrop''s measured, wise, and unembroidered prose, illuminating the fear, madness, and destruction within hearth and home—though never repudiating his love for same. In a tradition that stretches back through Flannery O''Connor and William Faulkner to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Keith Waldrop and Light While There Is Light are American treasures.

Not exactly a novel and not really a poem, though it contains some verses and is not without characters, this work describes a man late in life who has been around and who's thought about what he has seen and heard. He is a unique geezer, whose trains of thought seem often on tracks without station or schedule.

A moving poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive involvement with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.Keith Waldrop's account of his mid-twentieth-century Midwestern upbringing opens a window on a uniquely American landscape of desolation and desire. Waldrop's mother, central to the book, was a devout Christian, consumed with the question of just what a Christian was. Divorced from his father—a railway man, a Mason, coming and going with the Santa Fe railroad, then gone—she moves from place to place and from sect to sect, suffering migraines and speaking in tongues, teaching piano, and sinking ever deeper into apocalyptic reveries about tribulations lying in store and the advent of Christ's return. Then there are Waldrop's siblings: his sister on the hunt for a husband, and his loud, lounging, scapegrace older brothers in search of the next dollar and a good time, cooking up scams and leaving a mess behind. As for Waldrop, the narrator of what he describes as a fictional memoir, he looks back at those days with a peculiar detachment of his own, compassionate, quietly humorous at times, in light of which the simple facts assume a stark, near hallucinatory clarity, while scenes of life spool by like a home movie to no sound. "Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects," Waldrop writes, "provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world."In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop writes in a tradition that extends back to Hawthorne, Poe, and Dreiser, as he reveals the fear, madness, and destruction lurking behind the makeshift and make-believe of American life.