Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems: 1975-1990

by August Kleinzahler

Overview

The early poems of an American master

"I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.

At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father—
a sale on German beer.

Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon."
—"Poetics"

August Kleinzahler's first collections won him a cult following but have long been out of print and hard to find. Here Kleinzahler—acclaimed by The Times (London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"—has selected the best of the poems collected in Storm over Hackensack (1985) and Earthquake Weather (1989) and added an autobiographical Preface.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374527013
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/15/2000
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.26(d)

About the Author

August Kleinzahler's most recent collections are Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998) and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (FSG, 1995). He lives in San Francisco, where he writes a music column for The San Diego Weekly Reader.

Editorial Reviews

[Kleinzahler's] world is one of inundating multiplicity, noise, hubbub, traffic, crowds—a federation of intense and disparate states unified in a single sensibility. . . . Kleinzahler's concern with getting it exactly right is also Pound's, and his best successes here are just as crisp and pungent as Pound's most startling images.” —DeSales Harrison, Boston Book Review

“Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent, and rare—that quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Erza Pound's work. A loner, a genius.” —Allen Ginsberg

“August Kleinzahler is surely one of the best lyric poets writing today. . . . A typical piece is fleeting, unstable, almost improvisatory, entirely seductive in its aimlessness.” —Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

Kleinzahler's odd, enticing, deceptively informal powers of description, memory and offbeat contemplation have earned him plenty of fans in the last few years. Those excited by 1998's Green Sees Things in Waves will be happy to learn that the poet has been at work for decades, releasing poems like "The Sausage Master of Minsk" in chapbooks and volumes for Canadian, U.K. and U.S. small presses. Long-unavailable poems from those books reappear in this very welcome gathering, where verbal contraptions and slangy gizmos join forces with lovingly elevated epithets. For Kleinzahler, "the Mind is a too much thing/ cleansing itself like a great salt sea"; "the burnish of late autumn afternoons" with its "sadness coming on in waves is not round/ and sweet/ as the doleful cello/ but jagged, intent," like wind through a cracking-up house; and "Lavender smoke from the Con Ed Stacks" drapes itself over industrial "monuments of clunkish whimsy from an Age of Boom." Poems that look at first like impressionistic sketches or snapshots open out into subtle disquisitions; languor and alertness join hands in sinuous poems on down-trodden neighborhoods, "greasy soup," snow, playing hooky and the sounds of jazz. A disarmingly off-the-cuff new introduction shows the older poet remembering travels through "places like Vancouver Island, Alaska, Idaho, Montreal, Portugal, New Jersey, Manhattan and... San Francisco," and describing his British master Basil Bunting. Kleinzahler splits the book into "East" and "West": both halves show off the virtues that have made Kleinzahler one of the most enjoyable poets around. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kleinzahler has risen to a position of considerable eminence in American poetry; his last two collections (Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow; Green Sees Things in Waves) have been widely praised in reviews, and his poems appear in some of the larger publications to include poetry in their pages. His new work collects all that the poet wishes to preserve from his first two collections, and while his autobiographical preface constitutes something of a mild disclaimer of his earlier writing, readers should find familiar Kleinzahler here. No other American poet fuses the artful and the queasy-making so well: "Memory stinks,/ like good marinara sauce./ You never get that garlic smell/ out of the walls." Kleinzahler's manner is not unique, but he is one of the deftest practitioners of the disaffected manner: his poems are like records of bad dreams that it is better somehow to remember than to forget: "An ache so sweet was born those nights/ in the heat, in the grass, at summer's waning / that we try for it years later in the dance / of lust and lust's passing .../ but the heart is soon corrupted / and love's accoutrements grow fierce." For all collections of poetry.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Sixty poems drawn from Kleinzahler's early books, all of which are now out of print. In his introduction, Kleinzahler declares that he knew from his teens that he would be a poet, and the apprentice work that makes up much of this collection clearly came from someone who was a more astute than usual reader of contemporary verse. There are two sections (labeled "East" and "West"), but there is no indication of the chronology of the poems in either grouping; given that Kleinzahler now lives in the Bay Area, it would appear that the eastern poems came first, but within each part of the book there is a sense of a progression from gifted tyro to real master. The problem is that the development seems to run parallel, with weak efforts at the outset of both halves of the book. Kleinzahler's verse reveals from the outset many of the same mannerisms that can be found in his most recent work: a fondness for clever (or over-clever) anachronisms, a weakness for arch non sequiturs, and—at its best—a knack for making use of abrupt shifts in tone that presage a movement towards darkness and poignancy (which can be quite effective when it doesn't descend into sentimentality). For someone who is often sold as some sort of rock-music, post-beat bard, Kleinzahler employs language that is surprisingly mature and literary, even in these early works, but this collection will be of interest mostly to those who are already his fans.

Kirkus Reviews