Synopses & Reviews
David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting
The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse.
The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John's poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope -- meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.
Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell's Life Studies and John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.
Review
“St. Johns expansive, barely lineated prose brims with color, motion, and a cinematographers sense of mise-en-scène.” Library Journal
Review
“A shattered, ironic, yet seductive and haunting sequence of poems … [of] languorous beauty.” Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
“St. John has written an extremely beautiful book that brings us to the edge of beauty and beautys possibility.” Harvard Review
About the Author
Prizewinning poet David St. John is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as Where the Angels Come Toward Us, a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews. He is the co-editor, with Cole Swenson, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Venice Beach.