Geoffrey O’Brien

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Biographical note:  Geoffrey O’Brien was born in New York City. His poetry has been collected previously in A Book of Maps, The Hudson Mystery, Floating City, and A View of Buildings and Water. He is also the author of a number of prose works including Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties, The Phantom Empire, The Browser’s Ecstasy, and Sonata for Jukebox. He is editor-in-chief of The Library of America.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710713
ISBN-10:  1844710718
ISBN-13:  9781844710713
Author:  Geoffrey O’Brien
Title:  Red Sky Café
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-05
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Postcards and poem-cards, a fistful of sonnets, a cento stitched out of forgotten poems and a lipogram on cosmology, a Greek myth retold by its regretful hero and a number of unwritten novels synopsized, a dance number from a lost Betty Grable musical, a very small opera and the catalogue description of a painting best not looked at, the text for a funerary rite, a silent cowboy picture verbalized, interpretive extrapolations of an old engraving and of frames from the Nibelungen of Fritz Lang: these might be the wall-hangings for an open-roofed taverna on the outskirts of an eroding cityscape, where the sounds of distant bombardments occasionally filter through the floor show’s synthesized flute music. Red Sky Café is a mix of songs, narrative episodes, previews of coming attractions, and memorabilia of abandoned alleys, loft spaces, and television programs glimpsed in distorted form through the window of a neighbor’s apartment. The intercepts transcribed are not devoid of static and are occasionally interrupted by ambient laughter and crowd noises, not to mention the odd and invariably distressing newscast: with special guest appearances by Medusa, Catullus, Clinton prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and a complement of jungle moon men. Red Sky Café collects poems from the last decade, many of which appeared previously in such places as Hambone, Fence, Conjunctions, Open City, and The Germ.

Table of contents:
Part I
At the Bottom of the Island
The Dice Players
From an Old Engraving
La Menteuse
Aubade
Aubade 2
Techniques of Mass Persuasion
Part II
Prospectus
Funerary Parade
From the Old Age of Perseus
Intercept
Choral Fragments
Part III
Poem-Cards for the Red Sky Café
Part IV
A Set of Postcards
Roof Garden
Youth Culture
Children’s Games I
Children’s Games II
Black Mirror
The Bus
Liner Note
Insomnia
Little Opera
Standards
Up In the Old Loft
Guys
The Payback
House Detective
Part V
Letty Lane’s Wedding Day
Girls on Probation
Apartment 33
Jungle Moon Men
Robinson’s Nephew
Landscape: “The Forest”
Impressions: 1929
The Platform Sutra of Betty Grable
Part VI
Ground Speech (after Fritz Lang)
Four Reels, Believed Lost
The Green Lady
A Song Strung Out At Its Limit
A Coda

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Excerpt from book:  

From an Old Engraving

It is a crowd
every soul of which
imagines he knows

where he is going,
near enough to
peer over a neighbor’s

shoulder, close enough
to smell the fires
where the implements

are heating; every soul
presses to find a space
unclaimed by any other,

as if the whole scene—
the wagon packed
with prisoners, the canopy

fluttering over the platform
where the last stroke
will fall, the cluster

of half–sloshed soldiers
guarding the perimeter—
were staged for the benefit

of each pampered
spectator imagining
himself blessed

in his momentary
vantage, free from harm
or restraint, pushing forward

toward where the crowd
parts, just wide enough
to enjoy the show.

Unpublished endorsement :  O’Brien is one of the smartest, deepest, most rewarding poets we have. It’s his sentences, the amazing (or maybe amazed) lucidity and continuity of the man, being able to draw so much learning and frivolity to the heart’s aid.

Robert Kelly

Unpublished endorsement :  As befitting a polymath seemingly able to write anything, Geoffrey O’Brien moves from film-genre poem to Oulipian tour-de-force to skewed Shakespearian sonnet. Humor threads the selvages of Red Sky Café, but the cloth itself is a culture’s black bunting.

Susan Wheeler