Forever, for Now: Poems for a Later Love

by Louis Daniel Brodsky

Overview

Simultaneously capturing the innocence of youthful infatuation and the experience of mature love, in a romance between a divorcé and divorcée starting over in middle age, these poems record their first year together, transporting the reader from St. Louis to Chicago, New York, and beyond, into the land where forever occurs one day at a time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781568092263
Publisher:	Time Being Books
Publication date:	05/06/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	103
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

L.D. Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University the following year.

Brodsky is the author of thirty-seven volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Editions Gallimard), nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner, and three books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University’s Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

What People are Saying About This

Denys Viat

This exquisite masterpiece of modern poetry, a product of genuine talent, provides hope for the future by renewing our faith in mankind. Remember Brodsky, for sure! (Denys Viat, author of Les Amoreaux du Printemps and Un Monde en Marge)

Editorial Reviews

In Forever, for Now, Mississippi River poet Louis Daniel Brodsky has written a Huckleberry Finn of latter-day love. Cutting loose from worlds that have gone dismally wrong – "desperate, desolate, defunct marriages" – the protagonist and his beloved Janie hide from a world aboard a raft for two, drifting towards self-enfranchisement and love. But as the case of Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim, their romantic journey produces blessing different from those initially imagined. In the experiences inscribed in these poems, this occurs because the poet’s self is continually distracted by places that glitter and deceive – by posh hotels, overpriced restaurants, gourmet concerts, "hyped" museums. In a phrase befitting the Duke and Dauphin, Brodsky brands this collective place the "City of Ubiquitous Epiphanies." There the poet experiences "immense dis-ease." Thus instead of finding, in his various landings, objective correlatives for his unique selfhood or for the mysterious specialness of his love, the poet’s voice and his feelings of love emerge from the collisions with what might be called love’s skepticism of its autonomous being. Like Huck, the poet hangs suspended between "inventing and acting." Like Jim, the poet’s Janie remains subversive of the fables of luxury. What love’s skepticism opens for this poet is his participation in the human experience as being himself only one "avatar" of love in a recurring history that flows like the river (see the marvelous third stanza of "Picnic Along the River"). In "Forever, for Now," "A Sense of Place," "Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fearful," and "New York Sketches," we learn (not without sadness) that what love may achieve forever can only be more than individual love. This poet discovers that he must sing "Love’s prenuptial rites / To the marriage of Memory and Foreverafter." If real love and real poetry have a price, it may be this. - Sanford Budick, Director of the Center for Literary Studies The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Sanford Budick

This exquisite masterpiece of modern poetry, a product of genuine talent, provides hope for the future by renewing our faith in mankind. Remember Brodsky, for sure!
—author of Les Amoreaux du Printemps and Un Monde en Marge  

Denys Viat