Research Catalog

Title

Selected poems, 1968-1998 : John Wood.

Author

Wood, John, 1947 January 2-

Publication

Fayetteville, Ark. : University of Arkansas Press, 1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 181 pages; 23 cm

Summary

Selected Poems, 1968-1998, represents thirty years of John Wood's work, offering his readers a most comprehensive view of an unusual mind and spirit that is at once eloquent and humorous. In poems that range from narratives, lyrics, and elegies, to odes, satires, and even a mini-epic, his work whips language into intense emotion. The prospering genius of these poems is that they seek not so much to redeem or reclaim what is lost, but to redirect perspectives with a generous sweep of possibilities.

Uniform Title

Poems. Selections

Alternative Title

Poems.

Contents

• The Bitter Part of Heaven -- The Perils of Beauty -- The Comeback of Yma Sumac -- Cancer Talkers -- Upon Reading in the Newspaper That a Man in Kentucky Had Cut Off His Hand and His Foot with Pocket Knives and Then Gouged Out an Eye In Order That He Might Go to Heaven -- On a Photograph I Found of Two Young Factory Workers Standing beside a Piece of Heavy Machinery and Inscribed on the Reverse "Sacred to the Memory of Friendship" -- Remembering Madame Beausoleil, the Science Teacher at St. Dominic's Boys' Academy -- A Visitation -- Definitions -- The Correct Answers -- The Canticle of End-Times -- The Kali Yuga -- The Wastes of Resurrection -- Opie and the Apples -- How Little Lillian Found the Lord and Served Him -- Jam -- How I Tried to Explain the Certainties of Faith and Petrunkevitch's Famous Essay on the Wasp and the Tarantula to a Pentecostal Student Worried about My Soul -- About Their Father's Business -- Expulsions -- Baptisms -- Conversions -- Theological Meditation --
• Angelic Revelation -- Garden Walk after Looking at a Lacquer Box by Zeshin -- Flemish Scene -- Withdrawal and Return -- The Gates of the Elect Kingdom -- Shitheads -- Reflections on the Progress of the Western Intellectual Tradition from Thales to Crick and Watson -- Hunting for a New Chairman, Thinking about Giotto -- Professional Dreams -- Dreams of Standing -- Locomotion and Starlight -- Babies on the Beach -- Elegy for B. Kliban, Artist, Being a Meditation with Subverted Meaning on the Patron Saint of Crullers -- Star Washer -- The Last Model -- Odysseys of Desire and Thoughts of Cavafy -- Silage -- The Myths of Meanness -- Bees -- Remembering My Father Riding -- For My Father -- Thinking of My Mother -- Snapshots from the Fifties -- Remembering a Young Poet I'd Known in College -- Elegiac Stanza on a Photograph of Ethel Rosenberg in Her Kitchen -- Elegy -- Elegy in September -- Elegiac Ode -- The Bathers -- Flowers for Robert Mapplethorpe --
• The Mysteries: Elegy at Century's Close -- The Testament of the Saints: Fragments from a Requiem for Ronald Firbank -- Thinking of Maria Theresa Broussard, a Pregnant Girl in My Freshman Class My First Semester in Louisiana -- For a Friend Whose Son Committed Suicide -- Weights and Measures -- Seeing a Girl Who Looked like a Well-Known Child Actress Walking Toward San Tome, the Church in Toledo Where El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz Hangs -- Meditative Stanzas: On Stanley Spencer -- Sacred Celebrations for the Moon's Beginning: Five Menarcheal Songs with Epigraphs from St. Simeon -- The Honey of Hellas -- [actual symbol not reproducible] -- Homage to Dafydd ap Gwilym -- Here in Louisiana -- Voyages into Summer -- In Silver Season -- The Surrounding Grace -- A Crown of Promise -- Gifts -- Written on My Fiftieth Birthday -- The Song That You Are Watching -- Spring Wind: Meditation on a Line from the Ninth Eclogue of Virgil and a Contrary Meditation on a Line from Whitman --
• In Primary Light -- Self Portrait after Stanley Spencer.

ISBN

• 1557285594 (alk. paper)
• 1557285608 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

98054664

OCLC

• 40489350
• ocm40489350

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries