Don Share

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Biographical note:  Don Share is Curator of the Poetry Room at Harvard University, where he teaches and is Poetry Editor of Harvard Review; he is also Editor in Chief, Literary Imagination: the Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. His book of poems, Union, was a finalist for the Boston Globe/PEN-New England Winship Award for outstanding book; his other books are Seneca in English (Penguin Classics); I Have Lots of Heart: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Bloodaxe), which received a Times Literary Supplement/Society of Authors Translation Prize; and a critical edition of Basil Bunting forthcoming from Faber and Faber. He is from Memphis.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712946
ISBN:  9781844712946
Author:  Don Share
Title:  Squandermania
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
Extent:  104pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  156 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Don Share’s latest collection, Squandermania, is a book of poems that are slightly death-haunted and studded with references to marriage and fatherhood, geology and biology. It also revives a luminous, if complex, domesticity – not something most men take as their subject. Its focus is the frenzied energy and unreal depression of living in a world at war with terror, and ultimately with itself. Here the paralysis of long-standing grief and fear combine with strange energy of trying to get by from day to day: “If these are the woods, / I'm not out of them yet.”

There are poems about the intimate household terrors of marital relations and questions raised by children about what happens in the world, and others woven from a tapestry of literary interactions with sources that range from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's essay On Building to the “rotten kid theorem.”

Proverbs cease to reassure as the poet monitors news about global warning, war, and other self-inflicted disasters. What William James called the "trail of the human serpent" that runs over everything has at least (and perhaps finally) brought us to a world in which, as Share describes it, "anti-depressants make certain people violently depressed; / testing a safer system causes reactors to explode; / more freeways create more traffic; / the power grid dims, powerless; / [and] antibiotics make stronger germs."

These poems of conscience and imagination record the struggle to continue living in a "glitterbound microcosm" amidst the impulses of maniacal squandering and ceaseless destruction.

Table of contents:
I.
Marooned
Meaning
Landmarks
Ruby
Donny Doodle Furens
The Mystery Letter
The Seventy Interpreters
Food for Thought
I morti
II.
Rest
The Counterfeiters
“This building is alarmed” (anger language)
At Home
Medea in Reverse
Translated from the Potato Yiddish
Ovum
Father Cannot Yell
III.
Failure to Thrive
Digression of Air
Fiery Crash or Ferry Crash?
Explicit
The Sandpaper Ministry
Buddy Holly Gold
“An old image in arras hangings”
Maddy’s New Rhyme
I Will Go Out For More
Lustre
Bottle in the Smoke
Sweet Water, Best Bread
Men Pretending to Sleep
IV.
To Father
Intelligent Design
Squandermania, or: Falling asleep over
Delmore Schwartz
Honi soit .?.?.
Bookish Men
A Drop in the Bucket
Ontogeny
Murder
The Comedy of Clocks
The Dead Language
On Original Intent

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Excerpt from book:  

Maddy’s New Rhyme

Clock. And dark.
Millennia of dark ink, not blood,
illuminate the paper-thin walls
of our kindred veins: it's the dead
who keep us going,
because they couldn't live without us.
It's because of them that we
have to keep going.
So the sprawlings of hair on the sink —
brown, hers; black, mine —
curl into questions marks.
What if the terrorists strike again?
What if I don't live to see my daughter thrive,
or she survive to escort me to my grave?
Larger questions:
Who will be free? Who will die?
What is paradise?
Too hard. As it is, Maddy
looks out the window and asks, why
are there wounds in the ground
here … here … here … here?
Eyes wide as watercolor daubs,
she is my microcosm. Maddy and Daddy
eat lunch in the kitchen, and she asks
whether seeds are lonely;
no, I say to myself, not so long
as the rabbits and robins
outsmart the elastic snow.

Unpublished endorsement :  Squandermania is a book of associative delight, even when the poems are at their most grave. They combine the obliquity of Mina Loy, the incantatory freshness of Roethke, and even Plath’s devotion to nursery rhyme to leaven the book’s prevailing tones of irony, sorrow, and regret. The poet’s awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness. And yet the poet keeps faith with language by allowing language to drive the poems, even as the poet’s occasions and subject matter are grounded in what Hopkins called ‘the in-earnestness of speech.’

Tom Sleigh

Previous review quote:  Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music.

Alice Fulton

Previous review quote:  A fine poet …

Derek Walcott

Previous review quote:  Share's poems belong to earth and to air, to conscience and to imagination.

Rosanna Warren

Previous review quote:  Like those earlier singers, Whitman and Dickey, Don Share discovers again the distinctly American narrative … I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share’s imagination.

David Baker