Michael Heller

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Biographical note:  Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are Conviction's Net of Branches, In The Builded Place, Wordflow and Living Root: A Memoir. He wrote the libretto for the recently performed opera, Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin. His awards include the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, the Di Castagnola Prize and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. He was born in 1937 in New York City where he now lives.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857516
ISBN-10:  187685751X
ISBN-13:  9781876857516
Author:  Michael Heller
Title:  Exigent Futures
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jan-03
Extent:  180pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  270 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 17.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
from Accidental Center
In the Difficulties
Pressure:
Maro Spring
Paragraphs
The Body: A Fable
The Autumn of Apollinaire
Incontinence
from Knowledge
Knowledge
Florida Letter
Question and Answer before Threnody
Bialystok Stanzas
After Montale
The Mind’s Return
Postulates
Stanzas om Mount Elbert
Near Guernsey, Wyoming
On the Beach
from In the Builded Place
Father Parmenides
Moon Study
Coral Stanzas
The Bright Light at the Point
The Acoustics of Emptiness
Well-Dressing Rounds
Mythos of Logos
After Plato
Homer Timeless
In Central Park
Jury Duty in Manhattan
Adulation
Strophes from the Writings of Walter Benjamin
For Paul Blackburn
In the School
Outside a Classroom in Nerja
Tourist’s Cave
Statue: Jardin du Luxembourg
Climb to an Ancient Chateau in France
Fifty-Three Rue Notra Dame de Nazareth
Accidental Meeting with an Israeli Poet
Palestine
In a Dark Time, On his Grandfather
For Uncle Nat
Constellations of Waking
Two Swans in a Meadow by the Sea
A Night for Chinese Poets
January Nights
Late Visit
Being at East Hampton
This Many Colored Brush Which Once forced the Elements
Water, Heads, Hamptons
Partitions
Miami Waters
Father Studies
In Elegiacs, Birds of Florida
from Wordflow
Lecture with Celan
Leaving the Museum
Stanzas at Maresfield Gardens
Without Ozymandias
At the Muse’s Tomb
In Paris
Prony’s Calculations
Thinking of Mary
Partents’ Grave
One Day, What you Said to Yourself
She
To Postmodernity
Classical Theme
Sag Harbor, Whitman, as if an Ode
New Poems
Cyclical
“We cano only wish valeat quantum valere potest.”
Autobiographia
Winter Notes, East End

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Excerpt from book:  

Stanzas on Mount Elbert

Where we climbed in the berserk air
Of trails, sharp spiky views
And dizzying vertigo. I watched
Marmot and pika dart
Among lichen covered rocks
Envying not their agility
But that they survive
On such apparent bleakness.

Then, seeing you on the path above,
Aspen crook in hand, orange poncho
Bannered to the wind, the painter’s
Famous Wanderer in the Clouds,
Whatever passes between us,
Whoever you are, in that moment
You were a guide to me. We took
The path six inches at a time: with each
Breath a step; with each step a breath,
Sounds of ourselves reverberating
In hollows, in great brown cratered cups of rock
Until what was human seemed to be passing
Into its sheer facticity.

And by the summit, head abuzz in thin air,
Pain or joy or confusion heaped as one
Into the round bulge
Of the mountain’s endlessness, it was
Almost too comical to have walked there,
To worship at that feast of obstacles.

And the lakes four thousand feet below
Leered crazily. I think
We were looking back
At what does or does not exist,
What the mind mirrors; something
To which we do not so much return
As turn to, though the turning hurts.

Review quote:  There is a classic largeness to these poems, whether of means or of reference—a consummately civilized response to our times that makes the intimate and the physical still primary despite the generalized chaos Heller movingly confronts.

Robert Creeley

Review quote:  … tone perfect poems—the tone, the scale, note by note, interval by interval—attack on the ‘gods of ennui and loneliness.’

George Oppen

Review quote:  Michael Heller’s poetry is the song of metaphysical narrative.… The generous and powerful energies in these poems track the potential transformations inhering in ‘flimsy beatitudes of order,’ whose possibilities haunt and illuminate the entire book.

Armand Schwerner

Review quote:  The formal and thematic tension here creates a nearly elegiac tone.… Abstract ideas are juxtaposed with imagery of earth and sea, and nature becomes a symbol of human drama—passionate, unbridled.

Publishers Weekly