Threshold

by James Longenbach

Overview

Threshold is an extraordinary first collection that explores the shifting spaces between differing states of human experience. James Longenbach's poems dwell on metaphoric gates, doorways, and end points past which our everyday world seems luminous and strange. Technically superb and quietly moving, Threshold resonates with a fresh poetic voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226492476
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/1998
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

James Longenbach is a poet, literary critic, and the Joseph Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of five books of poems, most recently, Earthling, and eight critical works, most recently, The Virtues of Poetry and How Poems Get Made.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
What You Find in the Woods
Answers to a Question
Burglary
Real Estate
Natural World
The Afterthought
Orpheus or Eurydice
The Grace of the Witch
Learning to Drown
Another Person
The Origin of Angels
Play with Me
Elective Cardioversion
Any House You Know
Yard Work
A Dog, a Horse, a Rat
The Possibilities
In a World without Heaven
The Pretty Rocks
How to Remember
My Other Self
Faithless Angel
Bandusia
We Are Gathered Here
Threshold of the Visible World
What If
Letting Go
The Lucky Ones

What People are Saying About This

Robert Pinsky

James Longenbach's Threshold stands out among first books of poetry for its intelligence and thematic coherence; this is a book about fear, particularly the fear that outside of a charmed circle of normality disaster waits. . .An admirable and splendidly promising book.

Editorial Reviews

In his first book, Longenbach lays bare a continuous quest for connections between people and landscapes, parents and children, past and present selves. . . . His genuine, honest interest in how 'things accumulate/As if from nothing,' confronts the uneasy consequences of trying to map one's ideals onto the world. -- Boston Review

Jenn Lewin

James Logenbach's Threshold stands out among the first books of poetry for its intelligence and thematic coherence: this is a book about fear, particularly the fear that outside of normality disaster waits. The subject is treated without melodrama on one side or complacency on the other. This is an admirable and splendidly promising book.
— Phoenix Poets Series

Robert Pinsky

Using allusions (to Buddha, Einstein, Puccini, etc.) and italicized phrases and words, these elliptical, intense poems by the author of Love and the Soul (Univ. of Chicago, 1995) reach for connections between high art and mass culture (headlines, laser arcades, movie stars, rock bands); the title of his collection, after all, means "public matters." These sharp-edged poems strike home when they engrave "lineaments" of a modern consciousness struggling to overcome loss of power, internal tension ("the charmed life, the afflicted life"), and restless anomie: "the spaces inside the moment." At their best, poems about the "pearly, brooding days" of an intellectual's experience evoke "half-vanished" borderline nuances of transience: "the poignant/ half-thereness of summer twilights." Like a Hopper canvas, "place of arrivings, going into nowhere," this work reveals a critical sense of how "feelingless" and lonely the landscape is "out into America, under the thick, full stars." Recommended for all contemporary collections.--Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA

Library Journal

From the author of a handful of distinguished academic studies of modern poetry (Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, 1988, etc.), a debut collection that's surprisingly direct and fresh-sounding, and bears none of the heavy allusiveness one might expect from this Univ. of Rochester professor. Which is not to say that Longenbach isn't high-minded and, at times, relentlessly abstract, but his crisp phrasing and thematic consistency make this a volume worth sticking with: his meanings accrue with each poem. Meditative and often somber, Longenbach's measured verse explores the boundaries between human and spiritual existence, between man and nature, between parent and child, and between the everyday and the transcendent. He neatly avoids sentimentality in a number of poems on children: "The Origin of Angels" lingers on his daughter's sleeping form; "Play with Me" records a painful test of wills; and two poems ("A Dog, a Horse, a Rat" and "The Possibilities") imagine the worst-the loss of a child. Longenbach's unabashed domesticity leads him to contemplate its foundation in houses: a burglary disturbs by what the burglar leaves behind ("Burglary"), how "real," he wonders, is real estate ("Real Estate"), and a burnt-out house reveals a randomness ("Any House You Know"). Prominent among the book's thresholds are rites of passage-the transgressions of childhood, love's first treacheries-as well as the desire to escape solitude through the stories of others.

Kirkus Reviews