Research Catalog

Hotel Malabar : a narrative poem

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PS3557.A44 H68 1998	Off-site

Description

50 pages; 21 cm.

Summary

Hotel Malabar reads as if Brendan Galvin merged the William Faulkner of As I Lay Dying and the Joseph Conrad of The Secret Agent with Elmore Leonard's dialogue and the imagery of Orson Welles' The Third Man. The result is a narrative poem that reads like a popular novel even as it displays the images and rhythms of a master poet.
The setting is a Cape Cod hotel during a mid-1970s summer, and the poem unfolds through the monologues of five distinctive characters, an elderly Yankee "banana hand" who spent years in Central America as a plantation manager, three federal agents sent to discover his wartime activities there, and an Indian curandero who is the old man's source of medicines.
As it moves relentlessly toward its conclusion, this poem/mystery novel/spy thriller asks questions about human motivation, the nature of truth, and the consequences of secrecy and the willing fabrication of illusions, of a life lived in "a wilderness of mirrors."

Series Statement

The Iowa poetry prize

Uniform Title

Iowa poetry prize.

ISBN

087745597X (paper)

LCCN

97033395

OCLC

ocm37400915

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries