Synopses & Reviews
"Gilfillan is a storyteller whose appeal is more mystical than realistic."—ALA Booklist
Gilfillan’s -observations, quotations, etymologies, and classical forms are constructed by equal parts scholar and aesthete. He is a master of Low Distance. Gilfillan watches and then watches again. His writing is workman-like in the sense of what words are like, and luminous in its experimental directions.
"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated, and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be."—Tom Raworth
Merrill Gilfillan is the author of five books of poems and several books of prose essays.
Review
"The strongest poems feature a solitary, omniscient observer responding to the sky and land ... Most poems employ a spare and beautiful imagery characteristic of Chinese or Japanese nature poetry.... Deceptively simple, these poems reveal new beauties with each reading. Publishers Weekly About Skyliner and To Creature: "This is mental poetry: that is, everything from what Chogyan Trungpa would call "neurological buzz, to the flash of total genius, which is insight, which is image, which is literally the link between the charge of light that creates substance, "our" sun, and "our" selves....Merrill Gilfillan projects an elegant cool, and...a savage intensity....He has the gift." - Lewis MacAdams, Poetry Project Newsletter "Gilfillan is a master of the image - that is, he knows how to employ the image as both metaphor and narrative...The reader has to participate in the flow of Gilfillan's imagery, and so reading To Creature is in itself an act of poetry." - James Naiden, Small Press Review "The whole world provides the images and ideas for Gilfillan's poems....There is always a piling of one image/place upon another and what emerges is a mixture of fantasy-fact which is the principle texture of this work." Richard Longchamps, Contact About Light Years: Selected Early Work "Gilfillan has run his cosmic vacuum cleaner vision over most of space and time and rearranged the contents of the bag into poems which are truly generative. If these images won't jog your consciousness out of its planned itinerary, you're locked in like a cog railroad....This is American poetry via the Orion Nebula." -Abraxas "There are no jump cuts in these poems, whose themes deny their original impetus. Sometimes the poet's eye and ear are acutely tuned so as to validate poems that could otherwise be cheap. Gilfillan is a storyteller whose appeal is more mystical than realistic."ALA Booklist "I'd like to leave a copy of Merrill Gilfillan's book Light Years behind in a time capsule so the archaeologists some later time, a thousand years or so, could get an idea of what life was really like outside textbooks on ancient U.S. history and classical late English....This is punk-junk poetry: it has a trashy wrapper and gaudy Sunday morning hangover trumpets." -Books West
Review
"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be." Tom Raworth "...a poet whose work has the sure-footed, self-referential freshness of a Mayakovsky or a Gertrude Stein." San Francisco Review of Books
Synopsis
Poetry. A prolific writer who has won awards for his works of fiction as well as nonfiction Merrill delivers his eleventh book of poetry in THE SEASONS. "If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be" - Tom Raworth. "Code name Fava:/ an hour of April snow/ from San Sepolcro/ quarter, swirling down/ the hills, and then/ back up" - from Una Dozzina
Synopsis
Gilfillanâs hybrids swatches of observations, quotations, etymologies, classical forms are constructed by equal parts naturalist, aesthete, and scholar. His poetry is sometimes associated with New York-based writers who are now in their late 50s early 60s associated in the sense of an encyclopedic knowledge of literary styles, the visual arts, philosophical treatises, musical forms, and numerous languages but Gilfillanâs landscapes and inspirations are taken from the Western United States the Great Plains and mountains, which is part of what makes him so unique and refreshing.
Synopsis
Merrill Gilfillan is the author of five books of poems, Skyliner (Blue Wind), To Creature (Blue Wind, 1975), Light Years: Selected Early Work (1977, Blue Wind), River Through Rivertown (1982, The Figures), and Satin Street (1997, Moyer Bell). He is perhaps most well known for his books of prose essays that include Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (1998, Johnson Books), which won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, Grasshopper Falls (2000, Hanging Loose Press), and Magpie Rising (2000, Hard Press), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Gilfillan lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Synopsis
Merrill Gilfillan projects an elegant cool, and ... a savage intensity.... He has the gift.--Poetry Project Newsletter
About the Author
Gilfillan is the author of ten books of poetry, and several books of nonfiction essays on the Western United States.
Table of Contents
7 A Distant Bell
8 âAll Is Wellâ
9 1958
15 A Grove on the Musselshell
20 Third Snow (Renga Manqué)
23 For Emmanuel Blickenstaff
24 The Serpent
30 Satyr Near an Anthill
31 Subpoena for Johnny
33 Five Landscapes
36 A Nap by the Kickapoo
37 A Vesper
38 Systole Variations
40 Dancing at the Dells
43 Una Dozzina
50 The Man in the Moon
58 Rabbit Mountain
60 Bijou Hills?
61 1972
70 from Ten Carbonated Warblers
73 The Seasons