Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems

by Charles Harper Webb

Overview

An accessible new and selected collection of poems for poetry insiders and general readers. Powerful, passionate, humorous, and often complex, yet fun to read. They go down easy, but pack a whallop.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990727
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/18/2009
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, and Amplified Dog. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. Webb has received the Morse Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Pollak Prize, and Saltman Prize, as well as a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.  He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and directs the MFA in Creative Writing program there.

Table of Contents

Contents from Reading the Water 1997 The Mummy Meets Hot-Headed Naked Ice-Borers The Death of Santa Claus Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72 Spiders The Crane Boy One Story In Praise of Pliny Umbrellas Broken Toe Peaches Invocation to Allen as the Muse Euterpe The Shape of History from Liver 1999 Wedding Dress Over the Town Biblical Also-Rans Musk Turtle Tone of Voice Tenderness in Men Prozac Byron, Keats, and Shelley Someone Else‘s Good News Losing My Hair Love Poetry Descent from Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies 2001 Did That Really Happen? To Prove that We Existed Before You Were Born, Charles Harper Webb Vikings A Salesman and a Librarian Death Comes to the Baby Boom Waking at 3 A.M. Cocksucker Waiting Socks To Make My Countrymen Love Poetry from Hot Popsicles 2005 Consciousness Rat Defeated in a Landslide To Set Himself Off from the Crowd, Conan the Barbarian A Ticklish Situation Judge Frosty Presiding Imp of the Verbose Hot Popsicles Superman, Old Making Things Right from Amplified Dog 2006 Amplified Dog Ooh My Soul My Wife Insists That, On Our First Date, I Told Her I Had Seven Kinds of Hair The New World Book of Webbs Pumpkin Envy Cat Possessed by Poet Keats Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down The Animals Are Leaving A Meal Not Eaten A Grand Opening of Hearts The Open-Air Recital Survived a Shaky Start How to Live New Poems Shadow Ball Comebacks Blues Sneaker Males Goddess Feeders “Ghost of a Chance“ Big Kidnapper-Couple Who Forgot to Leave a Ransom Note Sentenced to 14 Years Teachers’ Names We‘ve Got Rhythm I Have Much Better Poems than This He Won’t Go to Sleep Without Me, Flashlight

Editorial Reviews

Webb at his best is genuinely funny and genuinely reliable in his reactions to the dilemmas of middle-aged American men: “My head's a planet with failing gravity,” he writes in “Losing My Hair”; “One by one its people fall into the sky.” This selection from five earlier books should confirm the esteem in which other poets hold his comic talents. The baby boom can seem inescapable: “Comebacks,” one of 14 new poems, considers “The Eagles” and “Robert Plant in '69”: “Don't all of our bands break up, our shows shut down,/ agents stop returning our calls?” Webb's humor sometimes suggests David Kirby or even Billy Collins, as in pieces called “Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down,” “Teachers' Names” (“ 'May I Have a Hall Pass, Mrs. Titsworth, Please?' ”) and even “I Have Much Better Poems than This.” When Webb shifts to seriousness, his advice becomes reliable but predictable, too (“Love freely. Treat ex-partners as kindly/ as you can”). Such lack of ambition may send away some readers: others, though, will deeply enjoy this affable writer's many brisk, sparkling lines. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shows us the full and hearty scope of human experience, shaped by music and keen perception, all through poems that are carefully crafted for sound, pacing and metaphor. 'Shadow Ball' illuminates the range of Webb's strange talent, a talent rooted, perhaps, in his background as a rock musician and psychotherapist, which makes him particularly skilled at capturing the small moments, the cadence and power of ordinary revelations, the drama, melodrama, tragicomedy and music in the life of Everyman, himself included."
--Rattle

"Webb's poems deserve the visibility and careful reading [this new volume] will give them. 'Shadow Ball' presents a complex sensibility in poems as deep as they are clear. . . .Webb's chief rhetorical mode in all his work is hyperbole. Fertility of invention is his main characteristic . . . Excess and strangeness vivify his verbal imagination."
--Michigan Quarterly Review

"Webb's poetry, while comic, is full of a poignant sense of the evanescence of things, for Webb is a great noticer. . . .Read this collection and be entertained."
--Main Street Rag

"'Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!'" Walt Whitman declared, and Charles Webb has come bursting through with great vitality and energy, with his sly wit and his dark irony, his funny bone and his rage, his rock-and-roll sensibility and his American gift for gab, his skepticism and his faith, his cunning art. It is a joy to have this life's work gathered together."
--Edward Hirsch

"For over two decades I've been reading, with great pleasure, the utterly unique poems of Charles Harper Webb. Operating somewhere between the lyric and the narrative--that rich grasslands where absolute clarity and reverberant mystery can happily exist--Shadow Ball shows us why we love poetry: it tries to tell us the truth and because the truth is often painful it sometimes makes us laugh. I can't wait to stand on a chair, wave this book in my hand, and shout: 'Read this book, citizens, read this book!'"
--Thomas Lux

"Webb at his best is genuinely funny and genuinely reliable in his reactions to the dilemmas of middle-aged American men . . . many brisk, sparkling lines."
--Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher