The White Hydrangeas - Couverture souple

O'Brien, Lawrence

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0615920608 ISBN 13 : 9780615920603

Editeur : Aldrich Press, 2013

Synopsis

Unlike many modern poets who offer us what are really prosaic essays arranged into stanzas, Larry O'Brien is a poet of rhythm and sound—of language which we recognize immediately as poetry. In his responses to the events and sights of everyday life, he sees—and helps us better see and experience—the beauty of the eternal as it is revealed in the ordinary, whence the title of the book: "White Hydrangeas"; for there is in his poetry a Wordsworthian sense of the presence of "The Other" in our lives; but without Wordsworth's frantic insistence on pointing it out, or trying to define it. He makes us simply experience the feeling that it is there. O'Brien frequently draws his images from his New England roots: he smells "the scent of a dying cornfield," or sees "maple leaves litter the ground / like flakes of fire fallen from heaven"; and yet he can be suddenly contemporary, using images drawn not from the ancient myths, but from our own modern myths, which we call movies: someone is "dragged down by blue / guilt deep in the belly of Monstro"; a friend's stepmother has a "look like Cruela de Vill," or we wait "for Bette Davis / to come storming in brandishing a chrome plated / revolver, eyes wide and hot with jealousy. Above all, this is the poetry of experience—the experience of Life as it is lived—Life with a capital L.
—Frank Salvidio (Assoc. Prof. of English {ret.} Westfield State University), author of Between Troy& Florence, Inventing Love, Vita Nuova (trans.) Inferno (trans.)
The second poem in Lawrence O’Brien’s new poetry collection, The White Hydrangeas, begins thus: Nostalgia/is a chronic condition/.... And so it can be, and yet I would add that, for O’Brien, nostalgia is both vibrant and sublime, a “condition” he nurtures in his poems with love, honor ancommemoration. These poems are devoted to memory, to stories of time, places, people and events that come alive in crisp, authentic detail O’Brien’s poems, rooted in southern New England, exquisitely braid music, family, the Latin Mass, the seasons and nature into a praise song for our earth and its mysterious, beloved creations.
—Becky Dennison Sakellariou’s chapbook, The Importance of Bone, won first prize from Blue Light Press, San Francisco, in 2005, and Hobblebush Books in New Hampshire recently published her first full-length book,Earth Listening.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

A native of Western Massachusetts, Larry O’Brien taught English for thirty-three years at Agawam High School in Agawam, Mass. Following an early retirement in 2002, he continued to teach composition, poetry and world literature as an adjunct professor at Western New England University in Springfield and at Westfield State University in Westfield for the past eleven years. He was a founder and, for thirteen years, the editor in chief of The Common Ground Review, a poetry journal that originated in Connecticut in 1999, and still continues as the poetry journal of Western New England University. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals over the past three decades.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Aldrich Press
• Date d'édition: 2013
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0615920608
• ISBN 13: 9780615920603
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 110
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg