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More copies of this ISBNDuties of an English Foreign Secretaryby MacGregor Card
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Poetry. Winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series selected by Martin Corless-Smith. When do "hermit" and "maudit" not rhyme? When you're a fellow traveler in Macgregor Card's global community of canny songsters. Card's deft, lushly Romantic speaker has "friends in London." No, he's got "friends in London," and the emphasis makes all the difference in this worldly debut. These poems are inexhaustibly sophisticated, not just because of the occasional mention of England and the English, or other European citizenry, which functions as a kind of breezy, fond wave to literary tradition, but because of its surefootedness in the terrain of pastoral/personal nostalgia: the longing for that which is a putative past, a past no one lived through. This is a sublime nonsensical balladry, a songbook of meditations on hospitality, fidelity, friendship, regret and the lyric, with a stylistic nod to the late Spasmodic Sydney Dobell, out of print since 1875. Here the song drives the engine and finds brilliant solutions. Review:"The speaker of Card's debut is a man at war with the shortness of his attention span: 'How long is the comedy/ about me?' he asks. Yet Card is less interested in answering questions than in changing the subject. 'There was a ship on fire last night,' begins the opening poem. 'I am ashamed and a burden to my friends.' This can be frustrating, but when he allows us to follow the faint strands of logic in his language, as though following a thread through a hedge maze, Card's voice triumphs over its attention deficiency: 'I need for you to wreck/ upon yourself// the salvage you recover/ from me.' Card falters when he abandons this thread altogether, as if to suggest his bombastic speaker and his language 'alone were fraught with confidence' the poems themselves need not surpass. Nevertheless, Card's strange and embattled voice works upon the ear long after the book is shut, and the originality of this debut is such that we might not yet know how to understand the operations of such a well-built yet brittle verbal machine." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"These tragi-comic choruses half recall a nursery rhyme, at once capricious and wise. A dignified hilarity ensues &mdsah; a lesson in listening, both precise and accidental — like songs you overhear when waking." Martin Corless-Smith Synopsis:An unusually dapper and worldly debut book of poems
Synopsis:"Card's strange embattled voice works upon the ear long after the book is shut."
--Publishers Weekly Synopsis:Winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series selected by Martin Corless-Smith. When do "hermit" and "maudit" not rhyme? When you're a fellow traveler in Macgregor Card's global community of canny songsters. These poems are inexhaustibly sophisticated, a songbook of meditations on hospitality, fidelity, friendship, regret and the lyric. Here the song drives the engine and finds brilliant solutions. About the AuthorMacgregor Card is a poet and bibliographer living in Brooklyn. He was co-editor of The Germ for its ten-year run. With Olivier Brossard he is editing an anthology of the New York School. Recent poems have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe, The Recluse, KGB Lit, Fence and Best American Poetry. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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