Synopses & Reviews
the holy worm of our tongues singing praise
our faces shining like cities our being one among many
our climbing Jacob's ladder to rock in the arms of angels
our walking here and there on the earth and looking around
Philip Schultz's work has always evoked "a brilliant cavalcade of people
and images that make you want to laugh and cry at the same time"
(Yehuda Amichai), but the poems in this new collection-his first in fifteen years--register a movement from desire, pain, and loss to sympathy, understanding, and love. In these meditations on friendship and the forgotten of our world, these elegies for the displaced and cherished dead, there is something new and wonderful-praise.
From the seemingly trivial hums and beeps of an answering machine to the painful experience of being touched by Alzheimer's, these extraordinary poems suffuse human experience with the wonder, laughter, and luminosity of life. With an intensity akin to prayer, they celebrate love--be it sexual, familial, romantic, or otherwise--in all its wonder and complexity, singing praise for what is most vulnerable, beautiful, and innocent in ourselves.
Review
PRAISE FOR PHILIP SCHULTZ
"Philip Schultz is a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation, full of slashing language, good rhythms, surprises, and the power to leave you meditating in the cave of his poems."--Norman Mailer
"A master at transmuting the rhythms of contemporary speech, and at combining them with his own haunting original music."--Grace Schulman
About the Author
Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry. His work has been published in countless magazines, including the New Yorker, Partisan Review, the New Republic, and the Paris Review. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine. He lives in East Hampton, New York.
Table of Contents
PART 1
The Holy Worm of Praise
My Friend Is Making Himself
Change
A Woman's Touch
Epithalamion
Courtship According to My Guardian Angel Stein
Flying Dogs
City Dogs
Marking
On First Hearing of Your Conception
PART 2
The Monologue
Solitaire
Sick
Disintegration
The Inside and The Outside
The Nutritive Values
The Answering Machine
The front left window
TV Series
Ars Poetica
Juror's Manual
Three Conversations Overheard in the Summer of 1994
On the corner
Personally
The Extra
The Stuntman
Prison Doctor
PART 3
The Dead
In Medias Res
The Displaced
The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem
I Remember
Alzheimer's
Apartment Sale
Nomads
Stories
Darwin, Sweeping
The Eight-Mile Bike Ride
The Silence
Mr. McGuire
The Dalai Lama
To William Dickey
Stein, Good-bye
The dark between
Mr. Parsky
PART 4
Souls Over Harlem
Acknowledgments