The Only Empty Place - Couverture souple

Lehnert, Richard

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798987347508

Editeur : Patterson Street Press, 2023

Synopsis

Richard Lehnert’s second book is selected from the hundreds of poems he has written in the twenty years since the publication of his first book, A Short History of the Usual, in 2003. The poems in The Only Empty Place are meticulously crafted and edited, with a hard-won lyricism as heartstrong as it is leached of sweetness, and powerful undertows of deep feeling. These poems are the distillation of a long and closely examined life. The writing is uncompromisedly honest and self-searching, with dry, dark humor. The Only Empty Place can serve as a handbook for those who delight in rigorous poetic craft when used to conduct deep moral inquiry, as well as for those who want to read examples of how the disciplined use of plain, direct speech can produce poems that hurt to read even as they heal. As Lehnert himself says, “These poems are the best of me.”

“Richard Lehnert is one of my favorite living poets, has been for decades, almost a lifetime. He confronts with scary clarity the grimmest matters: unbearable loss that must be borne, misunderstanding that can last a lifetime, failures of the human heart (especially his own), the vicissitudes of arbitrary evil, the mournful ravages of time, our inability to accept what we must—and then he doesaccept it, all of it. His poetry probes the small graces of our ordinary mortal lives, and finds in the huge though barely adequate power of love and compassion just enough meaning to make up for leaving it—leaving life—in the end. I suspect these often mournful poems approach something like—is it happiness? It might be. Why else, given the frequent sorrow of his subjects, is his poetry such an absolute joy to read?”
—Diana Hume George, author of Blake and Freud, The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America, and co-editor, Selected Poems of Anne Sexton

“Reveries are the hauntingest parts of memory and poetry. The poems in The Only Empty Place remind us of that, and that the truths of experience require many revisitings. Richard Lehnert’s openhearted poems reaffirm the necessity of clear language to deliver the verities that stay with you. These lines from ‘Life List’ could serve as both a summary and an ars poetica:
how I remember each gift of loss as from a separate life
each stone woman horse boy hand the last of that life
all gone none lost all lost none gone
“Mature writing takes time. Insights take time. The rewards are revealed in this fine collection.” —Allan Peterson, author of This Luminous and Fragile Acts

About the Author
Richard Lehnert’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Barrow Street, The Southern Review, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Spillway, Mid-American Review, Chautauqua, The Laurel Review, Commonweal, and many other journals. For more than 30 years he was a music critic for Stereophile magazine, for which he served nine years as Music Editor. His first book of poems, A Short History of the Usual, was published in 2003 by The Backwaters Press; a chapbook, Grief Needs a Body, was published in 1999 by Whole Notes Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Patterson Street Press
• Date d'édition: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798987347508
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 161
• 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