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, 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:  9781844715725
ISBN:  9781844715725
Author:  Geoffrey O’Brien
Title:  Early Autumn
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  07-Jul-10
Extent:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Two long poems on aspects of loss frame O’Brien’s collection. “Elegy for My Brother” starkly describes the physical process of dying and evokes the afterlife of memory, dream, and art. The final poem is a single long sentence in which glancing at a painting of ruins triggers confrontation with catastrophe.

Main description:  Early Autumn—the title derives from a plaintive jazz ballad with lyrics by Johnny Mercer—is framed by two long poems dealing with different aspects of loss. “Elegy for My Brother”—dedicated to the memory of the musician and visual artist Joel O’Brien—is both a confrontation with the physical process of dying and, in its second part, a description of the afterlife that subsists in memory, dream, and art. The book’s final poem, “The Ruins of a Long Gallery Illuminated Through a Hole in Its Vault,” is the expansive account, framed as an unbroken sentence, of a single moment: in looking at an 18th-Century painting of an ancient ruin, a kind of condensed world history is set in motion, moving through layers of experience and fantasy to come face to face with the recent catastrophe of the September 11 attack in the form of wreckage outside the poet’s window in New York.

Table of contents:
I
Elegy for My Brother
II
Signs
The Stairway Scene
From the Lonely Afternoons
For Creeley
Cascade
Seven Small Songs
The Messenger
III
The Ruins of a Long Gallery Illuminated hrough a Hole in Its Vault
A Note

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Excerpt from book:  

From the Lonely Afternoons

It’s 6:30, the harbor down there
is bathed in warm mist
that small boats move through

as if barely blown along
by invisible goddesses,
and on the sound system

Milton Nascimento
is still back in the Seventies
chanting his falsetto chant

about those immense spaces
of time, hot and vacant,
in which abandoned cathedrals

feel vines clutch their stonework
and aging lawyers doze
over their papers, at the hour

when light oppresses
like a tyrant who has parceled
all the good lands to his friends

and posted thugs
by every fence, people move
as if through a strangely silent

occupied city,
under the heavy sun
walking is grieving

and to see
is to be knocked on the eyes
by the glare of shuttered houses,
and to think is to be
weighed down with emptiness,
is to find yourself a thing

slivered down the middle
by the flimsiest blade,
a small high voice

that floats through the heat
with only just strength enough
to tear the sky in half.

Unpublished endorsement:  Geoffrey O’Brien is one of our most important poets. When I read his poems, some of the distinguished predecessors that come to mind are Cendrars and Follain, Williams and Creeley—the latter paid a wonderful homage in this collection. Among the many gems here is ‘Elegy for My Brother,’ which is one of the finest poems by an American poet in the last decade and one of the most powerful elegies I’ve read. True to his vision, expansive in his explorations, O’Brien has from the first been taking us on an amazing and revelatory journey; in this, perhaps his very best book, he offers up wisdom, delight, and the rare poetic certainty that an imagination which replenishes and transfigures its world so powerfully will always be capable of renewing us.

Nicholas Christopher

Unpublished endorsement:  Together with everything else you expect from a poem today, you get such a wonderful and rare gift: a story that you can read as such as if the poem were a novel in micrograms… O’Brien is hands down the most elegant poet writing today.

Nathaniel Tarn