Overlook: Poems

by Stephen Sandy

Overview

Years in the making, Stephen Sandy's Overlook gathers themes and occasions that have intrigued the poet throughout his career. This powerful collection explores love and death, success and failure, war and disaster, with appropriate measures of wit and grief. Meditations on life as a game to be completed rather than won juxtapose scenes of individuals confronting the challenges that occur in any life. Sandy balances these texts with poems elegiac in tone, written for friends and family, as in lyrics for his father, and in the masterly "As Smoke Robes Fire." Poems about art and artists, ranging from Nicolas Poussin and John Constable to Francis Bacon and Philip Guston, round out the collection.
Profound and rewarding, Overlook showcases the gifts of a master poet at the height of his powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807136928
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2010
Series:	LSU Press Paperback Original
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Stephen Sandy is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, most recently Weathers Permitting and Netsuke Days. He has taught at universities and workshops in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and has received, among other honors, a residency at the Bellagio Center, a Lannan Senior Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Fulbright Lectureship in Japan, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Vermont.

Read an Excerpt

"Inn of the Beginning Bar and Grill"

The heat was merciless and it was on.We could not recall how we had come so farno destination but for slaked desire. Look, distracted by distances destitute

in spite of credit we have no business hereand never gave a damn about permissions.Taillights shimmer in smog of intersectionsagents track us in the forbidden city

to a cul de sac where carcasses trundle on hooks.We huddle while a leering worker chants"you are about to have an industrial accident."Suddenly as a backfire everything stopped.

We woke, kindly and affectionate; we sawthat time as if an accelerator would unleash us; sensitive to our touch; our miles; our wishhere at the Inn of the Beginning Bar and Grill.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Marked by increasing skill and affective force, Sandy's work has achieved, over three decades, the depth and robustness of an outstanding vintage." — David Yezzi in Poetry magazine