WORK LIFE : New Poems - Softcover

Paul Kane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933527072 ISBN 13: 9781933527079

Publisher: TURTLE POINT PRESS, 2007

Synopsis

|Kane touches greatness here in the beautiful poignancy of Third Parent, a farewell to a late mother-in-law. Only a handful of American poems of the last few decades perform the work of mourning so eloquently. Kane is a meditative poet resigned to a kind of faithless faith that longs for a transcendence not available to it.| - Harold Bloom

About this title

Review:

Kane's big third collection presents poems as well crafted as any
these days, as well as a wonderfully appealing persona. His poetic voice is
modest, reporting ruminatively rather than solipsistically within the flow
of personal experience. There's no missing his intelligence--or his
cultivation. "Psyche," the long poem at this book's center, attests to his
strengths rather magnificently. It springboards from an encounter with a
butterfly (think of the famous, unfortunately faked, photo of Whitman and a
butterfly) into a long consideration of consciousness, of the soul. It is
set off by recollection of Apuleius' account in The Golden Ass of the
legend of Psyche's metamorphosis into a deity and powered by a train of
associations with works of art and literature that returns to the actual
butterfly and its life cycle before arriving at a restorative epiphany.
Perhaps Coleridge, were he with us now, would write such a poem. The
shorter poems in the book's four other parts are animated by the mythical,
the elegiac, the sociological, and the theological imaginations,
respectively. Each is eminently rereadable. --Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Booklist, 1 April 2007 Booklist, April 1, 2007

From the Publisher:

Paul Kane writes poems of heartbreaking beauty. Cerebral and
emotional in equal measure, Work Life contains his most personal lyrics.

About this edition

• Publisher: TURTLE POINT PRESS
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1933527072
• ISBN 13: 9781933527079
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120