Synopses & Reviews
Finalist, 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Throughout his award-winning career, Bruce Weigl has proven himself to be a poet of extraordinary emotional acuity and consummate craftsmanship. In The Abundance of Nothing, these qualities are on full display, animating and informing poems that combine rich, metaphoric imagery with direct, powerful language. Deftly weaving history and everyday experience, Weigl transports readers from the front lines of the Vietnam War and all the tangled cultural and emotional scenes of that time to the slow winds of the American Midwest that softly ease the voice of the veteran returning home. Though the poems struggle with themes of mortality and illness, violence and forgiveness, the poets voice never wavers in its meditative calm, poise, and compassion. Elegiac yet agile, ethereal yet embodied, The Abundance of Nothing is a work of searching openness, generous insight, and remarkable grace.
Synopsis
Finalist for 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Throughout his award-winning career, Bruce Weigl has proven himself to be a poet of extraordinary emotional acuity and consummate craftsmanship. In The Abundance of Nothing, these qualities are on full display, animating and informing poems that combine rich, metaphoric imagery with direct, powerful language.
About the Author
Bruce Weigls previous collections include After the Others (1999), Sweet Lorain (1996), and What Saves Us (1992), all published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. His poetry, essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such magazines and journals as The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harpers. Weigl has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, fellowships at Bread Loaf and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Table of Contents
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Part I: My Dimension
Quiet Fountain
The End of My Career in Dance
Conundrum
My Checkered Past
Thank You for Thinking of You
I Almost Didn’t See
In The Rest of the World, the Worry
Is Very Big
Ice Storm
My Dimension
Elegy for the Dead Whom I Love
Self-Portrait after “Hotel Insomnia”
Johnny
The Caves at Bai Non Nuoc
Bill
The Room
My Life with Cats
Pastoral
My Mother Fading
One Lie
My Nymphomaniac
For My Neighbors
Self-Portrait in Third Person at
Fifty-Eight
Reunion
The Country That We Love
Elegy for Anna N.
The Way Dante Moved Virgil through Hell
Part II: My Waiting Brain
My Waiting Brain
Part III: Meditation after Prayer
Blues for Que Mai
On the Little Juniata River
The Abundance of Nothing
What the Matter Was
Paradise of Pain
For Penelope
When I’m Gone
The World Part I
This Boy
Elegy for Liam
What Are You Going To Do
Gate
Letter to L.
Beginning
Wrong
She Said ‘But it was Only a Small
Hurt’
Deer Cave Drawing…
A Little Place on the Beach
Response to ‘Why Don’t You Write
About Something Happy’
To No Spirits Speak
South Lorain Suite
The Father in Me
Apocryphal Weather
Roses for the Reader
The Future
Flash
Meditation after Prayer Biographical Note