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Some Values of Landscape and Weather
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2003-10-08
112 Pages, 6.00 x 8.50 in
A visionary new work from an award-winning poet
Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."
PETER GIZZI is the author of Artificial Heart (1998), Periplum (1992) and numerous chapbooks. He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and in 1994 he received the prestigious Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
"Gizzi is a master of the mot juste and of sound structure"
~Marjorie Perloff, The Boston Book Review
"Peter Gizzi is on the quixotic mission of recovering the lyric [He] is taking the current doubt-ridden, cross-referential ways of reading and writing to heart while holding on to the old dream of making sense."
~Andrew McCord, New York Review of Books Reader's Catalog
"His poems manage to be inventive without being impudent, gorgeous without being gaudy, and so they are free of occupational hazards of contemporary lyric poetry: presumptuous egotism, grating allusiveness, treacly insouciance."
~John Palattella, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Gizzi is a master of the mot juste and of sound structure."
~Marjorie Perloff, The Boston Book Review
"Peter Gizzi writes challenging poems with substantial intellectual and emotional rewards. Taking his bearings primarily from the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets, he shares with his predecessors a lyric sensibility enriched by experimental tendencies. . . . Tonally assured even as they demonstrate self-doubt, many of these poems present a recognizable world skewed by the poet's perceptions. . . . In the end, Gizzi himself is a s much a reader of the world as he is a writer."
~Brian Henry, Times Literary Supplement
"Peter Gizzi is a stunningly gifted poet whose output ranges from beautifully compressed lyrics on the one hand, to capacious, crowded, weirdly convoluted, quasi-philosophical meditations on the other. His formally very cogent poems absorb the languages of tradition in a way that seems constantly to be opening quotations without ever closing them."
~Rod Mengham, Stand (U.K)
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