Interstate
Chard Deniord
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
Interstate is a collection of lyrical poems in four sections that concentrate thematically on animals, love and sex, compassion, and loss. A unifying elegiac conceit, even in the more ecstatic and humorous poems, betrays the bittersweet nature of the book's muse. Alternating between free and formal verse, the poems contain a lyrical tension in which their "broken music" evokes metaphysical paradoxes, romantic humor, and the "dark sounds" that effect what Garcia Lorca called "the power everyone feels" in the mystery of duende "but no philosopher can explain."
Product Details
Price
$18.00
$16.74
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh Press
Publish Date
August 28, 2015
Pages
96
Dimensions
6.0 X 8.7 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780822963899
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Chard deNiord is cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire, Sharp Golden Thorn, Night Mowing, The Double Truth, and Interstate. His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs is a collection of interviews with American poets. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets.
Reviews
"Interstate seamlessly connects the state of knowing, in a worldly sense, to that knowing that is deeply felt yet unbodied. The precise attention to the ordinary things of the world, and in particular to the natural world, gives way to the wisdom of the spirit undergirding these searching poems. Reading them, I felt the delights of language in each new revelation: 'Words were all; / they came to me like birds to a tree.'"
--Natasha Trethewey
"Chard deNiord is a poet who stands firmly in a tradition that weaves Stevens's philosophical daring to Whitman's open and unending heart. Therefore, Interstate is a gem of a book about the intersection of light and dark, joy and pain. For deNiord, the erotic love poem can only exist if we can properly contrast it to the heart-breaking elegy. These poems refuse to be nailed down, but they insist on being grounded: 'They sang ecstatically, as if it were morning, / although the sky was heavy with evening/ and you could hear the silence in the sky/ beyond their singing.'"
--Jericho Brown
"Here is a poet who goes again and again to the inherent beauty of Nature only to realize human consciousness works like a wedge to divide itself from that which it would love. This is a book of wisdom and affection, and because we sorely need those human efforts to reach the world beyond us, this is a necessary book."
--Maurice Manning
"Agile, quietly intelligent and steadily pleasurable."
--sevendaysvt.com
"Interstate navigates a world that is at once unsettlingly exterior and interior, as dreams underwrite the conscious perception of a realm equally strange and familiar."
--J. Allyn Rosser
--Natasha Trethewey
"Chard deNiord is a poet who stands firmly in a tradition that weaves Stevens's philosophical daring to Whitman's open and unending heart. Therefore, Interstate is a gem of a book about the intersection of light and dark, joy and pain. For deNiord, the erotic love poem can only exist if we can properly contrast it to the heart-breaking elegy. These poems refuse to be nailed down, but they insist on being grounded: 'They sang ecstatically, as if it were morning, / although the sky was heavy with evening/ and you could hear the silence in the sky/ beyond their singing.'"
--Jericho Brown
"Interstate has a fierce engine that is both erotic and metaphysical. Eros occurs when states are crossed -- bitter to sweet, mortal to immortal, conscious to unconscious. The metaphysical experience is like looking down a well. So, if readers look down its well and expect to see their reflection, they'll be disappointed, and if they look down its well and expect to see heaven, they'll be disappointed, but if they want to see both, and can live in the shimmer, then this book is for them."
--Bruce Smith
"Here is a poet who goes again and again to the inherent beauty of Nature only to realize human consciousness works like a wedge to divide itself from that which it would love. This is a book of wisdom and affection, and because we sorely need those human efforts to reach the world beyond us, this is a necessary book."
--Maurice Manning
"Agile, quietly intelligent and steadily pleasurable."
--sevendaysvt.com
"Interstate navigates a world that is at once unsettlingly exterior and interior, as dreams underwrite the conscious perception of a realm equally strange and familiar."
--J. Allyn Rosser
