Earthling: Poems

by James Longenbach

Overview

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Earthling confronts our deepest fears in clear and haunting language, from "a poet of extraordinary gifts" (American Academy of Arts and Letters).

"Earthling" is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353440
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	257 KB

About the Author

James Longenbach (1959–2022) was the author of seven volumes of poems and eight books of prose. His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2017
With great clarity, critic and poet Longenbach (The Virtues of Poetry) asks readers of his latest collection to “Imagine you’ve been in love forever, since before you were born.” The speaker in this text inhabits dual planes of metaphor and reality, and travels across great spans of time; he may take the shape of a crocodile one moment, then become a small child hiding underneath a table in the next. Shape-shifting and the mutability of the natural world are among Longenbach’s central themes—“it’s hard remaining human in the forest.” Objects and elements disappear, only to return again, startling as a cardinal landing on a branch “without dislodging a single flake” of snow. Longenbach’s poems are replete with symbolism; lutes and suitcases recur, standing in for time and distance, at once classical and contemporary. Throughout, the heart remains a mysterious teacher: ask it something and, “like a good physician,” it will elect “to keep silent, leaving me to answer for myself.” By the end of the book, Longenbach has made a moving case for love’s power to sustain us: “when you love one thing deeply, a person, a place/ Ultimately you love them all.” Longenbach’s language remains sparse, calm, and graceful even as his poems confront the finiteness of individual human lives. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"James Longenbach knows as much about how poems work as anyone in the world, but he hides this knowledge behind poems that feel so real and artless they hardly seem composed at all. The poems in Earthling are mythological in their simplicity, and their myth is the inevitable one of an isolated consciousness inhabiting places that might or might not be actual, ‘Moments when the artist in each of use created / The material world by finding the unfamiliar in the familiar.’"

John Koethe

"More than any poet of his generation, Longenbach adventures a cleanly and generous ambition for the art, constantly mindful of his subject as Matter beyond occasion—Matter to be reverenced and thereby understood. In Earthling, he touches upon glory. His ‘Allegory’ is the finest instance of transcendence in American writing since Ammons’s ‘Easter Morning.’ Every page of this collection merits permanence, a pleasure truly modern now."

Donald Revell

"Earthling stuns me with its clarities, it fascinates me to no end. Is it Longenbach’s passionate precision? Is it his absolute unmixed attentiveness that’s akin to prayer? To my mind, Earthling is far more than just another brilliant, elegant book of verse: this is elegance at the edge of the abyss. This is a human voice that has come to the middle of life’s desert to find that “In the middle of the desert / you might be anyone.” Longenbach finds here the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet: his voice in this book becomes any earthling’s voice. How does he do it? How does he give clarity to the human in us? In another century people used to call this effect visionary work: the poetry of a true mystic."

Ilya Kaminsky

"[Earthling] opens with several delightful poems that combine plain-spoken language and imaginative vistas as the speaker begins to explore what it means to live on Earth at this time…Literary references and allegorical narratives add to the surprises in this book, which shifts perceptively in each section yet ultimately reminds readers that 'when you love one thing deeply, a/ person, a place/ Ultimately you love them all.'"

Elizabeth Lund

"Longenbach gives his readers a route to follow, and its turns are precise."

Must-Read Poetry Pick The Millions

"Earthling is a gift—wise, aching, unafraid of pleasure and the less-than-pleasurable things that pleasure may commit us to. The whole thing is both grounded and airborne. A wonderful book."

Poetry - Matthew Bevis