A View of Buildings and Water

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Geoffrey O’Brien A View of Buildings and Water
Search for a word or phrase in this book … 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, and Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995. He is also the author of a number of prose works including Hardboiled America, Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties, The Phantom Empire, The Browser’s Ecstasy, and Castaways of the Image Planet. He is editor-in-chief of The Library of America. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781876857554 ISBN-10: 1876857552 ISBN-13: 9781876857554 Author: Geoffrey O’Brien Title: A View of Buildings and Water Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 15-Nov-02 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 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World	See larger image PAPERBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£9.99~~ £7.99 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$15.95~~ $12.76	Short description/annotation: This title collects poems from the last half-decade, ranging from a monologue from an unmade film noir to a sonic sculpture where sense is driven by sound. The narratives take their form from the myth-making of ordinary life, partly found and partly invented out of which we try to forge a connection between what has vanished and what is yet to come. Main description: In A View of Buildings and Water Geoffrey O’Brien collects poetry from the last half-decade, among them poems that first appeared in such magazines as Talisman, The Germ, The Literary Review, and New American Writing, and including a number of long sequences that have not appeared anywhere in their complete form. These poems extend a concern with mapping the geographies of dream, fantasy, and intuited history, and with finding a music that might realize those spaces in a flexible, responsive measure. In form the poems range from a monologue from an unmade film noir to a sonic sculpture where sense is made to follow where sounds lead. In “Heads in Limbo” a varied cast of characters is epitomized in a series of epitaph-like three-line poems. Central to the book is a cycle of five poems exploring the stages of grief against a shifting background of terrains both real and phantasmagoric. The book’s narratives—slippery, splintered, referring back to lost earlier chronicles—take their form from the mythmaking of ordinary life, the stories partly found and partly invented out of which we try to forge a connection to what has vanished and what has not yet arrived. Table of contents: Part I For a Diva Voice Over Virgilian Herb Peninsula Heads in Limbo The Prophet Part II The Lake The Hill Late Geometric Grave-Offering The Marsh The Deluge Part III Songs Done in Praise of Winter Sonic Ode Sonic Coda Tree of Names Providence The Ring The End of the Year Part IV Fires Were Started A History View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (64 KB) Excerpt from book: Providence He built a poem In such curious wise That the reader might bury things Among the words of its lines Just as the provident traveler Puts bread into a pouch Or a child slides under floorboards The image ripped from a forbidden book. What the reader hid Lay imperceptible under the surface Like a weapons cache planted in the desert By the harbingers of an invading army. The sand looked exactly like sand. The blue leaked blue continuously. The poem appeared to be the formal description Of an ancient and disheveled garden Whose patterns of irrigation Congealed at a more recent date Into abstract vinelike loops Sporadically torn or blotted. It was never clear if the hole In the lower right corner of the stanza Was the remnant of a tomb door Or the path to the picnic area. The words only said: “It dampens, And just as fringes hang from a branch The response of an apostate servant Rattles in the cavelike morning.” Years later the astonished reader Opens to the forgotten page And recoils from the still-visible Contour of a painful slash He had blotted formerly Against the refrain that contained “vines.” In place of what was written (“Cork’s odorous fetch” or “the split altar”) He studies as if under duress the map Of a wound—complete with nerves and ornaments— Exact as when the poet teased it From the wallpaper of a vacated room. Review quote: Geoffrey O’Brien’s poetry names and unnames connections, illuminates correspondences that darken again and almost dissolve in the darkness like mica flakes in basalt. The images and threads of narrative wink at the reader, but the beauty of the language holds irony at bay. Forrest Gander Review quote: The precision and ordered intelligence of Geoffrey O’Brien’s essays are turned inside out in the dream landscapes of his poetry. The result is a kind of spectral tapestry where words and images are stripped to their own inherent valence and deeper codings the bedtter to hunt down resemblances and resolutions. The effects are mysterious, hypnotic, often breathtaking, and, I think, unique in American poetry. August Kleinzahler Review quote: Geoffrey O’Brien is a poet of tremendous gifts and astounding, all-embracing erudition. John Ashbery