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Guests | October 15, 2009

A Few Initial and Not-Comprehensive Meditations on Group Novels

1 comment By Michelle Wildgen

I am a sucker for a book about a group. What reminded me of this was Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age, her homage to Mary McCarthy's endlessly re-readable... Continue »

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ad1968, July 10, 2009 (view all comments by ad1968)
Andrew Demcak continues to blossom as an important poet with his newest collection of pieces of imagination married to craftsmanship. ZERO SUMMER is apparently inspired or derived from the thoughts by TS Eliot’s Phrases from ‘Little Gidding’, one of the portions of his FOUR QUARTETS. Demcak divides this body of work into three sections, each reflecting a phrase from the quoted Eliot about those fractured moments in time trapped by circumstances, negating completion.

Part 1 ‘Between melting and freezing’ contains some of the finest erotic poetry. In what is becoming a hallmark for this poet, these poems define lust, desire, onanism, finding and feeling and losing love affairs, childhood longings and memories - the sum of a sensual being. His range is from the lyrical (‘Vincent V. in 1993’) to the raw. In ‘Venus in Furs’ Demcak defines eroticism:


….in
the morning I bag his lunch
while we f*ck
my spine flat on the ironing board

at
night
inside the moon’s Valium
he’ll feed
lipstick into my incubator
so my *sshole
will match Italian shoes.’

Part 2 ‘…this is the springtime But not in time’s covenant’ offers Demcak the opportunity to share the struggles of writing poetry as in ‘Automated Response to Mark Strand’ :’…the poem is a permission/given away’, or in the stunning ‘Myself in Memoirs’:


‘I’m this close
knee to chest
perceptible
visited by angry philosophers

such news embarrasses me
when training
lions

or
American lap dogs

or
those boys awed by the rancor of
slept-in beds

however true to my journal:

Eros
Then a few sticky peach peelings
and moonlight
on a dreamed-of ceiling.

In Part 3 ‘…a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,…’ Demcak delves into current events - tragedies, disease, social injustices, world events that seem planets away until he stirs them into spells for the reader. And he closes the collection with a moment of breathtaking beauty in ‘Moment of the Yew Tree, Moment of the Rose’:


‘wisteria spent itself completely
your twin garlands
over the juice pitchers
the block party pissing its light
into the grass

young peonies
dandelions
frowning white
the summer night
behind ears

no mistaking the tulips
who wanted to kiss you
waiting beneath cautious stars

somewhere
a lover folded like laughter
in dogwood blossom
moonlight
mint and dirt

your heart
as sure-footed as rainwater’

Imagery such as this and the countless other examples begging to be quoted from these fifty seven poems create such rich atmospheres of beauty and urgency, and thoughts without horizon, that them seem to be coming from countless fertile minds instead of just one – influenced though that mind may be by TS Eliot! Andrew Demcak has the gift and we are all richer for it.

-Grady Harp



From Randall Mann (author of Breakfast with Thom Gunn & Complaint in the Garden):

"ZERO SUMMER's skinny, sticky, cock-swaggering poems take 'bloody comfort' in Andrew Demcak's lubricated, literary longing, the bourbon 'sweet / with unimagined grief,' the very words 'laboring / over / the soup-bones of literature.' This is a book that will get under your fingernails."


—Randall Mann



From Nina Lindsay (author of Today's Special Dish):

“Spiralling electrically around a theme of longing, Demcak's newest work moves outward in arcs—from the sensual self, in erotic and familial relationship with the other ("my skin listening // still no accompanist: I can't kiss me!" )—to the writing and artistic self, the creative pursuit of spirit through form (God "an unflawed blackberry…rosettes of icing…the murdered and the living brightness")—to this spirit in the world and in other people ("O divine architect! / O quick-drying cement!"). His language is playful, charged, articulate and highly crafted—always with an introspective sense of humor and form. Full of music from Ellington to Schoenberg, full of heroes from Noah to Ginsberg, Demcak's poems are attuned to both absurdity and pathos, those extremes that lead the poet and the reader towards their "unimaginable" Zero Summer.”

—Nina Lindsay



From Kaya Oakes (author of Slanted and Enchanted, 2009 Henry Holt) on Goodreads:

"I'm biased, because I've believed the author's a genius since 1995. Hopefully the rest of the world will catch up with me soon."

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Product Details

ISBN:

9781935402077

Publisher:

Small Pr Distribution

Subject:

American poetry

Subject:

21st century

Publication Date:

2009-01-15

Binding:

Paperback

Grade Level:

SU

Language:

English