Eschewing irony for direct statement, the poems in Tod Marshall's first collection imagistically, musically, and passionately articulate a faith in human transcendence. From the mud of our formation ("Choir") to the dust of our dying ("After Kandinsky"), Marshall's poems lyrically obsess over how the broken and violated can envision and speak a heaven of which we know.Three long poems that shape the book are formative in this process. From the structured order of Bach's Goldberg Variations looming behind the opening poem, "Eclipse," to the clash of pagan beauty and traditional religiosity in "Botticelli," to the Modernist meditation on form in "After Kandinsky," the poems return again and again to the idea of anagogical presence and how it can be best rendered in art to inspire a celebratory ethos of living. Are the violent and shocking events those that best slap us awake? Or are the gentle, lyrical moments the times when we are most keenly aware of the song that is Being? In "After Kandinsky," Marshall writes, "like syntax / a poem that fixes the body / to a specific place / of points and lines and planes / and yet moves to celestial music / a poem that tests / on fifteenth century truth / 'Whoever loves much does much' / a poem that glistens with an unmatched insistence / a poem that arrives on time / and demands everyone / nail it to the wall."Here is a declaration that one could nail manifesto-like to the wall as a pronouncement of the need to see, to hear, and to speak of divinity in the world.

Dare Say: Poems (Winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition)

Literature & Fiction

Marshall, Tod

Poetry

Univ of Georgia Pr

Dare Say: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry)

University of Georgia Press

<p>These penetrating conversations with poets explore not only the landscape of contemporary poetry but the aesthetic, political, and spiritual textures of America and the world as expressed in language. Among the twenty participating poets are Robert Hass, Linda Bierds, Ed Hirsch, Dorianne Laux, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gillian Conoley, Li-Young Lee, Lucia Perillo, Robert Wrigley, Dave Smth, and David St. John.</p>

Range of the Possible: Conversations with Contemporary Poets

Essays & Correspondence

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

<p>Poetry. Subtly incorporating myth, history, landscape, pop culture, and aesthetics as possible solaces within the labyrinth of grief, THE TANGLED LINE explores the fragile circumstances of family and fatherhood. These poems remind us that when we try to possess, literally or figuratively, materially or metaphorically, legally or lyrically, we create the possibility of violence to ourselves, others, and the world—often injuring that which we hold most dear. "Father-son. Bodies. Seeing. Conventions of sentences. Grace. Distrust. Guilt. Souped-up engines. Sorrow. Love. Process. Hunger. Elk hair. Celebrities. Topeka. Arkansas. Tennessee. Spokane. A myth. The new you. A chicken-necked Daedalus. A pale cavefish. Red berries. If you're looking for a poet who can 'describe Breton to the Enlightenment,' look no further"—Gillian Conoley.</p>

The Tangled Line

Canarium Books

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