Defines terms dealing with the techniques, devices, verse forms, theories, concepts, and history of poetry

The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms (Longman English and Humanities Series)

Myers, Jack Elliott

SIMMs, Michael

Literature & Fiction

Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd

Migration

Poetry

UNKNO

This long awaited first book of poetry by Michael Simms is replete with joy, anguish, wonder, and the alarming consequences of the ontological and theological necessities of life.

Far Corner Books

Book by McClintock, Marian, Simms, Michael

O. Henry's Texas Stories

McClintock, Marian

Still Point Pr

Shapes by SCHMOO

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Beginning in the dirty realism of a working-class neighborhood and the misery of addicts, the collection traces one man's raw, funny and poignant evolution to maturity and acceptance. The poems range widely in style and use a broad diction that includes the slang of the streets and the tender language of love, as well as concepts of history, politics and science, to create a riff on what it is to be alive in a time which may very well be "the end of civilization as we know it." Simms weaves highly personal stories about his sister's suicide, his own struggle with addiction, and the joy of finding love and a spiritual path against a background of the desperate politics of our time: perpetual war, the decay of urban life, and the encroaching chaos caused by our violation of nature. Populated by addicts, alcoholics, policemen, soldiers, veterans, carpenters, Peace Corps volunteers, African villagers, children, orphans, scientists, dogs, teachers, leftist nuns, refugees, torturers and saints, the poems evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical. In the world revealed in this collection, Gracie Allen, Richard Feynman and Moondog show us the path to enlightenment. "Being ordinary," the poet says, "makes you a hero." At times playful and other times dead serious, Simms pushes the limits of what a book of poetry can do. With linguistic dexterity, he captures the syncopated rhythms of American speech recording one man's journey from childhood abuse and addiction to a spiritually enlightened vision of life in all its absurd complexity. With a compassionate eye for the troubled and the ridiculous, Simms speaks to the deepest longings and strangest predilections of the human experience. Intense yet forgiving, this is a tough, unrelenting voice touched by grace.

American Ash: Poems

Ragged Sky Press

In this richly imagined collection of poems, Michael Simms draws inspiration from history, psychology, biology, and astronomy, yet at heart he is simply a man with stories to tell. A poet returns home from the funeral of his parents to find that the language of grief is inadequate to describe his complicated relationship with his father, so he invents new words to describe his feelings. An autistic boy on a family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns descends deep into the earth, and breathing the darkness, he becomes a bat. A high school performance of Euripides's The Trojan Women becomes a terrifying prediction of what will happen to one of the girls after graduation. A conversation between two old men about Schubert's Death and the Maiden recalls accusations of sexual harassment one of the friends faces. And in a humorous ars poetica, Simms dreams of kidnapping Charles Bukowski and spiriting him to an AA meeting where Buk slings insults, jumps out the window and flies to the nearest bar on black wings, leading Simms to realize that American poetry needs its misfits and outlaws, and in fact, he prefers poems with a little dirt on them.\nSimms is a poet who writes as easily about the microfauna in a compost bin as about the complexities of love. He explains the hermeneutics of suspicion as adroitly as a visit to a dog park. He describes an old couple at the seashore through the eyes of an artist drawing them and the climate crises from the perspective of a bronze age king watching his city crumble. Gifted, smart, and flawed, frank about his alcoholism and other personal failings, Simms gives us poems that twist and turn and yet always remain clear in their intent. His empathy is all-embracing, and he challenges the reader's expectations by elegantly expressing abstract ideas through wildly creative, wholly original imagery. These poems keep returning to their central concern of how love can endure in a world that is collapsing. In language both musical and vernacular, Michael Simms stretches the limits of poetic autobiography until personal anecdote rises to the level of timeless myth.

Nightjar

Literary

Chard deNiord writes, "Michael Simms writes with the courage of a witness and the wisdom of a survivor. These poems leap, lament, pierce, transcend, delve, witness, praise, and testify to the curative power of poetry." Simms's new collection travels through grief, love, social justice, art and nature. The book begins with the poet's return to the Texas evangelical culture of his childhood to attend the funerals of his mother and sister. The poet reveals that he's autistic, a survivor of childhood abuse who didn't speak until he was five years old. The title poem "Strange Meadowlark" riffs on his emergence into language through learning how to listen to jazz. The second section of the book explores love through the beauty of the Texas landscape in poems that capture the happiness of childhood despite the presence of the ghost of the poet's sister -- as in the poem "White Rock Lake." The third section offers poems of social conscience. Racism, war, poverty, violence and America's unacknowledged caste structure are presented through personal narrative. The poems of the third section give witness to racism and police brutality. The final two sections bring together these themes of memory, love, loss and the search for justice in poems that focus on the observation of nature. The long poem "Faye Donnelly explains why the dead are in our lives" is a dialogue with a dying wise woman who explains to the poet how to let go of the ghost of his sister and move on with his life. The final poem "Pupa - a meditation on becoming" is a long poem that attempts to make lyric sense of the cycles of life and death.

Strange Meadowlark

United States

Jubal Rising: Poems: Poems

Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy

Humor & Satire

Madville Publishing

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Books by SIMMs, Michael