Synopses & Reviews
Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel, pledge and play.
Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island. The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated
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About the Author
Stephen Yenser is professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book of poems, The Fire in All Things, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
ILoveknot (Flagrantis speculum veneris) MRI: A Trance Spirare: Evening at Point Dume Paradise Cove Helen's Zen "Harmonie du Soir" Tidepools: La Jolla
II Sfakian Variations III Salle Archaïque: An Afterbeat Ghazal: Of Names Los Angeles Fractals
IV Valedictions Charles Gullans (1929-1993) Joseph Riddel (1931-1992) Doris Curran (1932-2000) Lorna Roberts (1942-2001) Robert Lowell (1917-1977) To Fall Kerouacky Across the Bar Jumbo's Clown Room Polo Lounge Lunaria Shutters Numbers Variations on Ovid V Inkles, Shreds & Scales VI Blue Guide