Brian Henry

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Biographical note:  American poet Brian Henry is the author of five previous books—Astronaut (short-listed for the Forward Prize), American Incident, Graft, Quarantine (winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award), and The Stripping Point. His work has been translated into Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovenian. He has co-edited Verse since 1995. His translation of Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things is forthcoming from BOA Editions.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717484
ISBN:  9781844717484
Author:  Brian Henry
Title:  Wings Without Birds
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Aug-10
Extent:  76pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  114 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Brian Henry’s Wings Without Birds makes the everyday a site for innovation and investigation. Although diverse in form, these poems continually return to explorations of family, time, selfhood, and physical space. Moving through marriage and parenthood, the house and the backyard, Henry’s poems consider ways of being simultaneously singular and plural.

Main description:  Brian Henry’s Wings Without Birds reconfigures the quotidian, making the everyday a site for innovation and investigation. Although diverse in form, these poems continually return to explorations of family, time, selfhood, and physical space. Moving through marriage and parenthood, the house and the backyard, Henry’s poems consider ways of being simultaneously singular and plural. Although known for having a dark and satirical sensibility, he brings compassion and self-deprecating humor to Wings Without Birds, delving into what binds people to each other. At the center of the book, the long poem “Where We Stand Now” offers a meditative stream of quotidiana that captures both the daily and the domestic with tenderness, wit, and vigor. With other poets who have informed his aesthetic—particularly James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Forbes—as the book’s presiding spirits, Henry continually explores how to occupy a moment, how to identify “what dominates the near.”

Table of contents:
Epithalamium
Severance Pay
To Toddle
In the Neighborhood of Horses
Reign of Blisters
I Wanted To Be Good
In the Neighborhood of Horses
Abusing Another for the Sake of
In the Neighborhood of Horses
The Cassandra Complex
Housebound Mayhem
By Virtue of
The Term Loosely
Bad Gardener
Irish Spring
A Fine Piece of Equipment, Indeed
With Something Like Determination,
With Purpose
Where We Stand Now
Impossible Hypotenuse
Wings Without Birds
Where Hannibal Whomped the Romans
Crawlspace
Neither Did the Trees nor Stones Remain Any Longer in Their Places
What To Do With a Fat Rope of Old Vine
Life's Better on the Porch
Materniliad
Family, Portrait
This Route
Sometimes
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Life’s Better on the Porch

To visit, from the street,
a house you lived in as a child
is to strain to see the tops
of trees you could once vault with ease
before someone put up a fence,
the basketball goal, the ornamental
wheelbarrow on the once-white porch,
the railing of which you leapt
to chase down and pummel a friend
who ignored your command to keep off
the seedlings that, with water and time,
would establish this now-hardy yard,
which was struggling to catch
when the kid tried to undo what nature
would have done but was doing too slowly:
shape a half-acre into something
like a home, or what one driving by
would think to call a home
regardless of the air within,
on the other side of the still-black steel door,
which never stuck when it rained.

Previous review quote:  Brian Henry … entices the reader into the hidden crevices and empty spaces of daily existence.

PN Review

Previous review quote:  Henry displays a linguistic and intellectual exuberance comparable to Paul Muldoon.

Magma