Falling Awake: Poems

by Gary Margolis

Overview

These are poems of the present, of commercials and human interest stories, of the drive-in windows that make banks and bedrooms of our cars. These poems trace the faint erasures of time and human relationships-following runners as they pause by the Ticonderoga ferry and Lake Champlain, riding with tourists across a river to an old fort, the distant sounds of a historic slaughter obscured by the misfiring pistons of an inboard motor and by the unforgiving surf.

Describing the world he has seen and loved as well as how that world sometimes threatens itself, Gary Margolis speaks with caring humor and seriousness of the brokenness and beauty of America's present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820332451
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	The Contemporary Poetry Series
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

GARY MARGOLIS is the executive director of College Mental Health Services and associate professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. A former Robert Frost Fellow and staff member at Bread Loaf, he has also taught at the University of Vermont and Tennessee Writers' Conferences. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the New England Review, and Poetry, among others. His most recent book is Fire in the Orchard. He is on the board of the Vermont Humanities Council and first recipient of the St. Michael's College Clinical Psychology Sam Dietzel Award for mental health practice in Vermont.

GARY MARGOLIS is the executive director of College Mental Health Services and associate professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. A former Robert Frost Fellow and staff member at Bread Loaf, he has also taught at the University of Vermont and Tennessee Writers' Conferences. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the New England Review, and Poetry, among others. His most recent book is Fire in the Orchard. He is on the board of the Vermont Humanities Council and first recipient of the St. Michael's College Clinical Psychology Sam Dietzel Award for mental health practice in Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

Margolis's poetry exemplifies the style of the post-Deep Image academic main stream: carefully measured (as opposed to metered) lines, ordinary diction, and a reflective, passively egocentric voice that seems all too comfortably settled in the quiet, if intellectually heightened milieu of semirural gentility: ``the world beside our house.'' Imagery is drawn from the familiar lodes of wildlife, wind, and stars, and while some titles promise invention (``Waiting at the Office of Ma gritte'') the poems often strain for pro fundity, lapsing instead toward senti ment (``I need your hand to fly'') or to routine figures. The unrelenting even ness of this collection stifles the occa sionally perceptive sensibility behind it. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.

Library Journal