O Wheel: Poems

Overview

O Wheel is a book of amazing delicacy, intricacy, and formal beauty that nevertheless reveals terrifying truths. Its backdrop is an edgy mix of the intense violence of South Africa's recent history, the intensely personal struggles of the human soul for the rights to speak freely and to experience justice, and the expanse of the American literary landscape. Sacks employs a variety of poetic styles and approaches that break ground formally as well as thematically. With a vision that is at once personal and public,...
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2000 Trade paperback New. No dust jacket as issued. Signed by author. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 104 p. Audience: General/trade. Fast shipping.

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Bogart, Georgia, U.S.A. 2000 Trade Paper New NEW BOOK! Small red star inside front cover.

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Overview

O Wheel is a book of amazing delicacy, intricacy, and formal beauty that nevertheless reveals terrifying truths. Its backdrop is an edgy mix of the intense violence of South Africa's recent history, the intensely personal struggles of the human soul for the rights to speak freely and to experience justice, and the expanse of the American literary landscape. Sacks employs a variety of poetic styles and approaches that break ground formally as well as thematically. With a vision that is at once personal and public, he contends with nihilism and extracts hope from even the most barbaric aspects of human nature. O Wheel offers sensitive and striking poems that menace, overwhelm, entice, provoke, and deeply move the reader.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
"Must form itself become the work of anguish?" Sacks's fourth collection of poetry argues that indeed it must. Compression, elision, and tense lexical compounding are the devices Sacks, following if not equaling Mandelstam and Celan, selects for this work of proleptic mourning--for a father in the excruciating final stages of a disease that leaves him, like the Marsyas of Greek myth, "flayed by Apollo," and for a South Africa shedding the skin of apartheid in convulsions that bring "the wild speeding up of change to absolute." The poet means us to hear the death-rattle of impending retribution in the latter phrase and elsewhere; the poem "Relief," for one, ends abruptly on the words: "Waiting to be killed." The odd-numbered sequences of the five-section book engage fragmented forms of lyric utterance (one notes the debt to Jorie Graham) to sound an ominous landscape, similar to the actual combat zones Sacks recalled in Natal Command: "I felt it/ in the warning/ downward// leaf & branch/ beneath// their fingers/ rapid// murderous/ (& there was music // --hacking)." These alternate with sections charting--with dire, if chronically oblique, precision--the nightmarish vicissitudes of terminal illness. Though his command of the elegiac register is subtle and studied (he devoted a scholarly monograph to the subject in the mid-1980s), Sacks is a less adept political allegorist: the three sections of wide-scope meditation are prone to phobic and dystopic stereotypes as the disoriented poet grasps at myth and mystique to make sense of South Africa's complex social transformation. Even so, the personal and political anguish of this volume is hard to gainsay. Imagining the knife blade pressed to his neck, Sacks does what he must: "sing out, the blade says,/ sing." Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Internet Bookwatch
O Wheel is a collection of powerful, visionary, aesthetically intricate poetry by a master wordsmith who contents with nihilism, extracting hope from even the most desperate aspects of human nature. The poetry of Peter Sacks is superbly engaging, profoundly moving, literate and memorable. Look In Your Heart: Unshelled/floatrock and mother-lode./The mountain sagged then broke apart,/each ounce so concentrated nothing held/whatever stamp of its disfiguring/the mind made uncontainable./Gloved tongues./The body wrapped and set where space had been./Crush out the breath crush out the words/they feed and carry it away./Where we have fallen./Crawling out.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780820321844
  • Publisher: University of Georgia Press
  • Publication date: 4/1/2000
  • Pages: 92
  • Product dimensions: 5.97 (w) x 8.98 (h) x 0.30 (d)

Read an Excerpt




Chapter One


THE TREE


This was a different sound, repeated from the other side pressed to the disappearing
    throat,
face, fingers, memory of.
The door blew wide on swells that shone back through the tree the ocean
    swung from—
single leaf.
Branch by branch you climbed to where the voices rained.
You held up the song, frayed to the whispered friction of grass when wind
    drops & the
meadow whistles under a dipping finch
the surf swept backward by a larger breath than you could draw till now.
Releasing everything, you climbed again among the others reaching through
to where the world, surprised by hearing pieces of its name, looks back
    into the crowd of
those still vanishing. Who called?


OFFERING


Intolerable
hands
untwisted only
to new
instruments
of sound
over the earth's
own mortar-pitted
brand caught
fleeing out of
chaos
funneled grit &
bonesmoke
climbing
north over the
cropped &
varnished
heads
night watchnight
wall dug
through each new
descendent
filing
the unfinished
iron chamber
music
sharpening.


CALLING


Woken by
the always less than
full-strength
angel
fists clenched
mouth still open
undergone
you had to look around
---
I swallowed I began to
swallow river-bank
stone root stump
graft of who lay back?
whose plough?
---
To separate the words: black furrow
ox axe spine
inconstant constant
gold streaks straggling fortune
sweet juice in your mouth
for what?—
just there
below the shag of
---
doublings where the blade
shears through each
further version
---
death each way
---
white scales
the high unsentencing
---
set free (his representing
power of another kind)
---
before the end
I cut the whole wings
from my heart.


THE TRIAL


Dark flame seeding
rimless
bolted
will & matter
indistinguishable
until they had
invented God
one God.
---
I felt it
in the warning
downward
leaf & branch
beneath
their fingers
rapid
murderous
(& there was music
—hacking)
(cities multiplied)
the defile
late cut deep into
the bone
abraded hand-
sewn through
surrendered
needle-grained
the wick &
spending
between worlds.
White boulders,
dry sea bed.
Absolved.
Or is it taken back
under the smoke?


ASK ME


Unlit
channel leaf
I cannot
whistles
everywhere against
the setting
hung to bleed
a thorn-like bow
string blur
sinks into
the throat
define it
red drop
feather
merchandise
unveiled
the flesh
once only
to be sold
this near edge
nothing mercy
flung all
face-of-hearing
lean stone
membrane
dug
who listen
swiftly kept
alongside
lifted
hope how it
would cling
against
necessity
it clings you
do as from
the cliff high
branches and
you will.


FACE


And yet there was
a face on
which the spirit
moved—one
breath drawn
out all-branching &
another following
depths—lit
spindles redividing
as
the voice cuts
forward through
salt silt the reeds (we
saw them sway-back
in our wake)—cut
pounded sliced
again—black mat of
memory.
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Table of Contents

The Tree 3
Offering 4
Calling 6
The Trial 8
Ask Me 10
Face 12
Leopard 15
Spur 29
Refuge 30
The Change 32
Choice 34
Charter 36
Untitled 38
Reach 39
Look in Your Heart 40
Two Mountains 43
Story 69
The Ocean, Naming It 70
Votive 72
Election 74
Channel 77
Relief 80
For the Dead 85
Notes 89
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