Big Spring

by Elliot Figman

Overview

Writes Colette Inez of Figman’s Big Spring, “Meditative, playful, sensual, and witty, ELLIOT FIGMAN’S poems offer us insights and mysteries that veer from the cool, precise ruminations on loss to lyrical intensities of joy… What begins in an exploration of sorrow and restraint ends in resonance and amplitude, all the while acknowledging an unbiased universe. It is exhilarating to read these evolved and varied poems of transformation and love.” These are spare, airy poems that speak quietly about loud things.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781884800474
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/01/2003
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

ELLIOT FIGMAN was born and raised in the Brinx and was educated at Oberlin College and the University of Massachusetts. He Taught in Massachusetts and Brooklyn before coming to Poets & Writers where he now serves as Executive Director. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, he has published his work Pequod Poetry, TriQurterly, and other literary journals. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Ella.

Read an Excerpt

Big Spring
For Henry Kellerman
The sun is breaking through the window
in the incadescent flashes, but you say
it's no big deal.All you know is the steam
in our pipes keep on kicking.The magnolias
have opened their arms to gret us, the sun
circles closer to our planet, but you still feel
a chill in the air-as far as your concerned
it's just another spin around the axis, it's no
big spring, nothing that enormous. Last night
I dreamed of a squad of shortstops oiling the stiffness
out of their gloves-the smell of pine tar
sometimes flies all the way from Pensacola,
but no green diamond, not even Central Park
with its bans of azaleas scrubbed by last night's rain
convinces you to savor the season. Let it die,
you say, let it pass as everthing passes. But I
insist precisely since this spring will pass
that

Table of Contents

Dear Reader 3 Little Fingers 4 I. The Issue 11 Not Getting Any 12 One Tree 13 Otherwise 14 It was a Story 15 Away 17 Once 18 The Tunnel 19 Everything I Know about Love 20 The New Poem 21 Still Life 22 Great Pond 23 Your Own Good Leg 25 O to the River of Words 26 The Silence 27 On the Eve of the Bombing 29 II. Night and Day 33 Ever 34 Riding In 35 Station Music 36 This Life 37 Christmas in Germany 38 Poem 39 The Room 40 This Morning 41 Giving In 42 Metropolitan Poem 43 Nightspeed 44 Nude Hugging Her Own 45 Ruby 46 With One Hand Missing 48 Vow 49 Big Spring 51

What People are Saying About This

Vijay Seshadri

"Elliot Figman's poems are ecstatic in the original, the best sense of the word. They stand out from themselves, and by doing sothey give to the transparent human ardors and longings that inspire them a disquieting luminousness. They bring us, by means of their faultless elegance and their clarifying order, face to face with the astonishing paradox that only by cherishing what is within the reach of our hands and present to our eyes can we transcend the boundaries of our world. All the poems in Big Spring are beautiful, and many of them are almost unbearably so."

Colette Inez

"Meditative, playful, sensual, and witty, Elliot Figman's poems offer us insights and mysteries that veer from the cool, precise ruminations on loss to lyrical intensities of joy... What begins in an exploration of sorrow and restraint ends in resonance and amplitude, all the while acknowledging an unbiased universe. It is exhilarating to read these evolved and varied poems of transformation and love."