Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. ENVELOPE OF NIGHT: SELECTED AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS offers an essential record of the literary achievements of Michael Burkard from 1966 to 1990. This selection offers Burkard aficionados and those new to his work an opportunity to encounter what Ashbery has praised as Burkard's "urgent messages from a distant galaxy." It features an insightful foreword by the author, generous selections from five early books (the out-of-print collections In a White Light, Ruby for Grief, The Fires They Kept, Fictions from the Self and None, River) and "A Thief in the Lamp," a compelling, book-length section of previously unpublished poems that provides crucial insight into the trajectory of the development of Burkard's work. According to poet-critic Ethan Paquin, Burkard's poems "break from reality and American lyrical status quo to offer timeless, elegant revelations." This is a definitive volume of a major American writer and a dazzling litmus of the range of the poetic mind.
Synopsis
Over the course of his distinguished career, Michael Burkard has drawn praise from poets as diverse as John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Jean Valentine, James Tate, Tomas Transtr mer, and Timothy Liu for a poetry that "returns us to a primary strangeness." This selection offers Burkard aficionados and those new to his work an opportunity to encounter what Ashbery has praised as Burkard's "urgent messages from a distant galaxy." According to poet-critic Ethan Paquin, Burkard's poems "break from reality and American lyrical status quo to offer timeless, elegant revelations." Envelope of Night features an insightful foreword by the author, generous selections from five early books (the out-of-print collections In a White Light, Ruby for Grief, The Fires They Kept, Fictions from the Self and None, River) and "A Thief in the Lamp," a compelling, book-length section of previously unpublished poems that provides crucial insight into the trajectory of the development of Burkard's work. This definitive volume is an essential record of the achievements of a major American writer and a dazzling litmus of the range of the poetic mind.
About the Author
Michael Burkard is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, most recently Envelope of Night (Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966-1990), published by Nightboat Books in 2008. In addition, hundreds of his poems have been published in such prominent little magazines as the American Poetry Review, which gave him the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Award in 1984, 1985, and 1999, and Ploughshares, which honored him with its Denise and Mel Cohen Award in 1986. He received the Whiting Writers' Award from the Whiting Foundation in 1988, and his poems have been included in four of the Best American Poetry anthologies (2000, 2001, 2004, and 2005) and he won a Pushcart Prize, in 1988.