Radio, Radio: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) - Softcover

Doyle, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807126799 ISBN 13: 9780807126790

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Radio, Radio, Ben Doyle's first collection, is a book about gaps: between the transmitter and the desired, unimaginable receiver; between the prehistoric insect world and our fast-food, hotwired culture; between words and what they just might mean. They meet us in the interstices between the moment just gone and the next one, with little agenda but to thrill, refresh, discomfit, and warn. Doyle's poems leap freely from sestina to sonnet to fragment to prose, searching for what they do not know. These are lyrics of serious intelligence - they think carefully and deliberately but use often startling images and varied, original musics to deepen, widen, and rudder this thinking: "In the middle of every field,/obscured from the side by grass/or cornhusks, is a clearing where/she works burying swans alive/into the black earth" ("Radio, Radio"). Alternately playful, grim, realistic, surreal, tempered, associative, wise, and astonished, Radio, Radio finds an original niche in the poetry of the day, one that uses the veneer of contemporary poetics to reflect the human mind and soul that lie beneath.

About this title

About the Author

A native of Cuba, New York, Ben Doyle is adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807126799
• ISBN 13: 9780807126790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 74