Don't Miss

• Holiday Catalog 2009
• NYRB Classics: Save 30%
• Paperback Favorites
  for Book Groups
• Springer Math Sale!
• Subscribe to Indiespensable

More at Powell's

• Featured Signed Editions
• Rare and Collectible Books
• eBooks | Audio | DVDs | Blu-ray

Finding John Irving: The Powells.com Interview

1. 
   $19.60 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   Last Night in Twisted River

   John Irving

Synopses & Reviews

Synopsis:

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!

Average customer rating based on 3 comments:

Grady Harp, October 4, 2008 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
A Magician of Poetry

Andrew Demcak is a polished professional. Though his poems have appeared in many very fine journals, this appears to be his first published collection where the stage is his and his alone. His style is unique: each of the 66 poems is written in six stanzas of couplets and each poem lives on an individual page, and from this 'confinement' that would restrict other writers in scope of content and conveying a mood or atmosphere or short story, Demcak creates his magic.

The range of emotions and images and topics and observations he touches is so vast that Demcak is able to address any reader of poetry and enhance previous flights of thought with completely new visions. Equally at home in describing nature and people and memories of poets passed, he draws upon what seems like an endless vocabulary which he uses in ways that causes our infatuation with words to blossom with fresh meaning. An example:

'SLEEP IN THE MOJAVE DESERT
We doze and swelter in a comfortless
desert. Stars ignite the lengthy evening.

Crickets congregate in their armor-plate.
Grains of sand retain the day's heat. We lie

queerly here, objects of obsidian.
The rabbi's sad cry from owl talon.

The sky splits at sunup to dearer air,
cool dew gliding from the blue horizon,

the straight distance without road or address.
Noonday earthstones connecting dry lines,

guarding their pallid salts, where lizards creep
like firecats emerged from cinders.'

Extracting one poem from this bounty contained in CATCHING TIGERS IN RED WEATHER is almost cruel, so completely fresh is every poem and profound. Demcak is able to cross gender lines as well as any poet today as his LAST LOVE proves:

'So everything came into place, He tore
the gauze to the core of my boyhood,

sliding in while my eyelids turned plum.
His bitter mouth, the insistent red veil

of the Gaza sun, my thighs like twin doors
held open. I had chosen the closest

man, cut my bandages like a runner
testing his legs. I unfolded myself

a loose-petalled Narcissus, Anxious
for his erection, condomless, straining,

unaware that his body politic
was followed by the viral campaign.'

Andrew Demcak is an important new voice, a man who will surely change literature and the way we enter the unexplainable places that poetry finds and describes. This is a rich book of brilliant jewels. Highly recommended!

Grady Harp

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(25 of 28 readers found this comment helpful)

report this comment

oliver569, December 13, 2007 (view all comments by oliver569)
Andrew Demcak makes a great debut with this book. The form of the poems are all the same (2 line stanzas with 6 stanzas) but within each stanza is a smooth lexicon & solid word choice. The poems make you want to read them again and again. His word choice invites the reader to rethink the multi-layered meanings of the poetry. Not just 5 Stars, 5 Supernovas.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(13 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)

report this comment

ad1968, October 29, 2007 (view all comments by ad1968)
Andrew Demcak's poems make acrobatic leaps and turns that dizzy and delight me, flashing their urban wit, their old-young wisdom, and their exhilarating range of language and feeling. Demcak's ingenious invention is a compact, elegant form, repeated throughout the book as world after surprising world, under intense pressure, flares within it. This is a book of gems.

— Joan Larkin, Lambda-Award winning author of Cold River, A Long Sound, My Body: New and Selected Poems

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(16 of 17 readers found this comment helpful)

report this comment

View all 3 comments

Product Details

ISBN:

9780977089239

Author:

Demcak, Andrew

Publisher:

Three Candles Press

Subject:

American - General

Copyright:

2007

Publication Date:

October 2007

Binding:

Paperback

Language:

English

Pages:

88

Dimensions:

9.00x6.08x.24 in. .29 lbs.