Synopses & Reviews
In a country where much of the prominent poetry seeks to affirm the fleeting present and its changing values, John Peck’s poetry comes as an important, if unlikely, gift. Peck’s verse deals the cards of the fragmentary, ideogramic, juxtapositional, and elliptical through the deck of normally discursive syntax. Echoing late high Modernism, Peck’s work, in the words of novelist Joseph McElroy, is “a way of seeing things,” confident “in the packed vividness of the referential.” Avoiding the narrow identity- or group-specific viewpoint of some of his contemporaries, Peck invites us to enter the larger humanscape and unearth with him unnoticed connections to our shared past and to one another. In Contradance, his ninth collection, Peck’s passion for inquiry and historical reflection has never been stronger or more beautifully embodied.
Review
Praise for John Peck“John Peck may be the best American poet whose name you’ve never heard.” Peter Campion
Review
“The best free-verse writers we have today are probably August Kleinzahler and John Peck.” Poetry
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“John Peck is unique among contemporary American poets for the burnished, intricate density of his thought and the rugged, even gnarled lyricism of his lines. The ghosts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Avedon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Melville, and a host of others stalk gravely through the steps of Peck’s Contradance, their spectral presences a ghostly counterpoint to the poet’s preternatural awareness of the buzzy, blooming confusion of the present moment: ‘Life is not a thing / that we have, it is being seeking employment.’ ”—Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University
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“[I]t is the extraordinary fineness of intelligence and heart at work in these poems, their music, and their sensuous and exact images, their scrupulous conscience, that can win for their readers what is so difficult, a vision of art and life bound together by both justice and love.”
Review
“This is a deeply intellectual, deeply profound poetry.”
About the Author
John Peck is a freelance editor and translator and a practicing Jungian analyst. He is the author of eight books of poems, most recently of Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems, 1994–2001, published in the Phoenix Poets series by the University of Chicago Press, and a cotranslator of C. G. Jung’s The Red Book.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsCenturies
Dawn Renga
Canticle of the Winepress
Flowers and Birds of the FourSeasons . . .
Society of Friends
Giovanni, would you . . .
To the One Who Stole My Box of Tools
Club W.
Avedon in his last days . . .
New York Sonnets
The Battle of Anghiari
To Melville with Pry-Bar
Aquarius
Green, Yellow, Red
I Hear You Calling
Philosophia, East 65th Street
A Bridge Beneath
Inwood Hill
The Project
Children's Zoo
Vitrine
The Web in Central Park
Anfiteatro Flaviano
The Chrysler Building, Met Life, Trump Tower
Liber Studiorum
Hammonassett, Connecticut
A Veteran
Duchess
Book of Serenity
Fire
Papyrus Fragment Egerton 2
1618
From the Factory in Wolfsburg
Incomings
Four Rivers and the Pennsy Yards
Contradance
Out of strife, peace: . . .
Venice's last . . .
Across and through— . . .
R. M. R.
Book of the Dead? We Have No Book of the Dead
Violin
Notes