Temper

by Beth Bachmann

Overview

Temper is at once violent and controlled, unflinching and unforgiving in temperament. The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990666
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/13/2009
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	207 KB

About the Author

Beth Bachmann is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and the author of two prior books from the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Do Not Rise, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Poems from CEASE received the Virginia Quarterly Review Emily Clark Balch Prize. Each fall, Bachmann serves as Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University.

Table of Contents

Contents Temper I Paternoster First Mystery Of My Sister After The Telling Last Call Quotes From The Papers Lineup First Mystery Of My Father Defense Language Second Mystery Of My Father Sorrowful Mystery Setting Plot Second Mystery Of My Sister Rapt Woodpile Talk Show Answering Machine Joyous Mystery Heaven II A New Way Of Thinking About Space Hell Hunger Nesting Erato Signal Mirror Colorization Mystery Beneath A Handprint Of Light Panic Counting Weather Deception Mystery Of The Noise The Air Makes When Milled Mimicry Answer To The Mystery Of My Blank Stare III Luminous Mystery Gene Mapping Tracking Sirens Supple Spit Concealment Evasion Betrayal Radio Glorious Mystery Finishing Moves Mystery Ending With A Girl In A Field Cold Logic Elegy Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

The difficulties of making art about violence might have churned the poems into melodrama or diffused them into abstraction, but Bachmann’s temperate approach yields work that is eerily calm and anything but bloodless. Tough and impressive, ‘Temper’ leaves its mark.”
—The Georgia Review

"Here we have metamorphosis, resonance, transfromation, the alchemy of art. Bachmann is able by a few simple direct gestures . . . to connect her personal grief and tragedy to the whole tradition of English (and Western) verse and to the poetic impulse itself to make beauty out of sorrow."
—Poetry

“A thorough and vivid emotional narrative, taking the reader to an unsettling depth of personal tragedy at breakneck speed.”
—Oxford American

“In her lush economies, psychic darkness, and imperative forthrightness, Bachmann is clearly an heir of Louise Glück  and there’s a trace of Whitman here, too . . .  The grief in ‘Temper’ is raw, relentless, and unadorned; in the crucible of Bachmann’s sensibility, this sorry becomes gracious force.”
—On the Seawall

“An often haunting image of time juttering forward and back ceaselessly, lives never completely explained or tragedy never finally understood.”
—Heavy Bear

“Nothing short of a stunning debut. Rarely have I felt so compelled by a collection, so utterly incapable of turning away. “
—Poet Lore

“Bachmann is able—by a few simple, direct gestures toward pastoral elegy, invoking nymphs and shepherds by rejecting them—to connect her personal grief and tragedy to the whole tradition of English (and Western) verse and to the poetic impulse itself to make beauty out of sorrow.”
—Poetry

From the Publisher