The Happiness of this World

by Karl Kirchwey

Overview

It is this "shockability" that informs Karl Kirchwey's new work. Through four collections, he has explored the resonances between past and present, seeking a sense of home in a world of losses. Now, as the horrors of the modern world crowd in on him, he meditates on the future his children will inherit. These are angry poems, tender poems, poems of hope, love, and despair.

Reviewing Kirchwey's last book in The New Criterion, William Logan wrote: "An elegy for an uncle, a World War II pilot killed in the Pacific, reminds us that we live only by the sacrifice of the dead, and therefore in their shadows. Shadows fall frequently over these poems, from lives corrupted, crippled, or destroyed," and in the concluding section of this new work, a prose memoir with poems that will appear in full in Parnassus, the poet revisits that dead uncle and the unhappy generations preceding his own. Seeking out family origins and family secrets, this section climaxes in a holy Hindu pilgrimage in honor of the dead and returns the poet, who in his search has circled the globe, to the family of the living and the circumscribed happiness of this world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440684548
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/11/2007
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	199 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Karl Kirchwey, whose work appears in such publications as Grand Street, The Paris Review, and Parnassus and has been anthologized widely, is the author of three acclaimed collections. Formerly Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, he is now Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     xiii
The Happiness of This World: (from the French of Christophe Plantin)     xv
Original Song
Morning     3
Spring Narcissus     4
A Pressed Rose, Being My Father's Gift to My Mother on the Day I Was Born     5
Fireflies     6
Upon a Lock of His Own Hair, Kept from the Age of Nineteen Months     7
Mockingbird     8
A Pair of Sterling Silver Shoehorns     9
Garter Snakes     10
A Presto of Schubert's     11
An Answering Wit
Metaphor     15
Blackberries     16
Reading Akhmatova     17
A Sonata of Biber's     18
Sandlot & Tenderloin     20
The News     21
At Giacometti's Grave     22
Black Cat: (from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke)     26
Road Kill     27
Speedway Feature     29
Rendition
Nocturne, Morningside Heights     33
The War     34
Chases in Arras     37
Homecoming: (after The Odyssey, Book XXIII)     39
After Suetonius     40
Quiet Like the Fog     41
Villanelle     43
TheBonobites     45
Dandelions     47
Repair
Val Veddasca     51
Russell's Store     53
Repair     54
Interior with Portrait of Savonarola     56
The Names     58
Tynnichus of Chalcis     60
A Yatra for Yama     61
Notes     103

Editorial Reviews

A fine draftsman of formal verse, and a careful, gentle observer of American and Italian landscape and art, Kirchwey (At the Palace of Jove, 2002) has been a poet more respected than cherished; with this vivid collection, that may change. Kirchwey begins with poems and ends with moving prose, about family past and present. In one of the best of the lyric works in part one, Kirchwey envisions his son "dodging the blasted yew," "striding into the day/ like Gandalf toward Mordor." An appropriately stripped-down, grimly serious tribute to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (incorporating the sculptor's own words) makes the highlight of part two, whose poems all focus on other artists and their art: here and throughout as with the best of Stanley Kunitz a web of allusions bolsters, rather than detracts from, Kirchwey's sincerity. Part three lets Kirchwey's normally controlled verse, and his talent for closed forms, denounce with righteous vigor the recent conduct of the American government there's even an effective villanelle about Abu Ghraib. The poet closes with a prose memoir, dedicated to Yama, the Hindu goddess of death, which links various aspects of his family history to world events (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This fifth collection by Kirchwey (At the Palace of Jove) will further his reputation as a delicate and attentive craftsman whose poems bring together music and feeling with a skill that few of his contemporaries can match. His formal elegance ("I will make this garden flower/ I will coax one seed to grow,/ teach the braided thorns to utter/ why he have her this, and how") is on display throughout. But what is most interesting here is Kirchwey's willingness to break through the boundaries of form into a realm both tender and furious, as he attempts to give us something like a vision of his world, making it ours. The book's marvelous early poem "A Presto of Schubert's" reminds one of Anthony Hecht's brilliant and unforgettable "A Hill, " and, like Hecht, Kirchwey is unafraid to look at the dark subjects such as war and violence with feeling that pierces us, avoiding sentiment and banality. Further on, other poems, such as "Homecoming" and "The Bonobites," are instantly memorable for their ability to use detail and irony and yet somehow remain mysterious. Reviewing this book, one is tempted to stop and talk about each poem, taking it on its own terms, and no one should miss the final sequence, a memoir in prose and verse about the author's trip to India and Cambodia in search of his family's secret self. A captivating work; for all poetry collections.-Ilya Kaminsky, San Diego State Univ. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

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