Tin Can Tourist / Edition 2

by Scott Hightower

Overview

A world of history is a world of destinations and possibilities. In Tin Can Tourist Scott Hightower draws from a legacy larger than the limits of personal history, body, and brand. From the harsh Protestant landscape of his native central Texas to the pageantry of the historical architecture of St. Maria in Trastevere, Rome, he persues the limit of the poet. Where exactly does one begin and the world start? Hightower reflects a world containing AIDS and cancer, Caravaggio and van der Werff. Nature, interpersonal relationships, and the culture of the world-from simple to extraordinary-are all fair game. His partaking, erotic self, in search of its own truest and most urgent expressions, takes seriously Blake's warning of error that could reduce the human heart to a dull cog of a machine (Blake's exact words are a mill with complicated wheels.) The breadth and mastery of this awaited debut volume is matched by the poet's insistence on the healing and transforming power of the human imagination. These are not notes from an artless heart-but observations from a simmering world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823221523
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Edition description:	2
Pages:	79
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Scott Hightower is contributing editor to The Journal and teaches at Fordham University and New York University.

What People are Saying About This

Mark Svenvold

Here is a wonderful first book that employs the markers that have come to stand, in Texas, in Rome, for permanence, from fence to forum--the legal lattice-work of land ownership, graves, burial mounds--in a brilliant meditation on transience that displaces all of these things. As you read this book, the title begins to shimmer, pointing to our own passing, the temporary shelter we have taken here on earth, as tourists in time.

Marie Ponsot

The most exciting quality of Hightower's work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness. Its lively incidents and anecdotes are grounded, rooted, in meditative awareness.
— winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and author of The Bird Catcher

Jim Richardson

The life of Scott Hightower's poised and sensuous meditations is a second life. He returns as an elegiac wanderer to a world that has itself wandered from its meaning. "What is it I'm after?" is his question, and he waits with a mirror-smooth patience and a democratic tenderness for his need and the world to declare themselves. These poems watch with care, for anything may vanish, anything may be a revelation.

Editorial Reviews

The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness. Its lively incidents and anecdotes are grounded, rooted, in meditative awareness.”——Marie Ponsot, winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and author of The Bird Catcher

From the Publisher

“The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness. Its lively incidents and anecdotes are grounded, rooted, in meditative awareness.

winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and author of The Bird Catcher - Marie Ponsot