Candy Necklace / Edition 1

by Cal Bedient, Calvin Bedient

Overview

The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes — including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossãand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819512215
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	03/15/1997
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

CAL BEDIENT is Professor of English at UCLA and author of several books of literary criticism, including He Do the Police in Different Voices (1987).

What People are Saying About This

Donald Revell

“Poems with an edge that makes them truly vivid and literally astonishing.”

David St. John

"There is a truly original and powerful mind at work in this collection. It reflects one of the most sophisticated understandings of poetic voice in contemporary poetry."

From the Publisher

"There is a truly original and powerful mind at work in this collection. It reflects one of the most sophisticated understandings of poetic voice in contemporary poetry."—David St. John

"Poems with an edge that makes them truly vivid and literally astonishing."—Donald Revell

Editorial Reviews

"Alive in every direction . . . an altogether unexpected and brilliant poetic debut."—Robert Hass, Boston Review

"There is a truly original and powerful mind at work in this collection. It reflects one of the most sophisticated understandings of poetic voice in contemporary poetry."—David St. John

"Poems with an edge that makes them truly vivid and literally astonishing."—Donald Revell

From the Publisher

Bedient writes with a painter's sensibility, the manifestations of which are threefold. One: splashes of color and references to art spring up in nearly every poem. Sometimes the effect is calming ("the only pink/ left by evening is the blush on a fishing boat"); but more often, the purpose is to alarm the reader, and when Bedient finds the right image to pair with a color, the work soars. "You're the white of rolling horse eyes/ when the hay burns," he tells his about-to-be-married son. And, in a poem about child abuse, there is "the color-sketch you showed her of the bomb/ you'd stitched into her sleeping heart." Two: language assumes the malleability of paint. Bedient mixes words as he would acrylics. Nouns stand in for verbs. Objects and subjects blur ("A thing must country backwoods in itself"). Three: Bedient treats the page as a canvas. He writes with rich description and is especially apt at portraits of anger. While we don't necessarily get deep inside his thoughts, we nonetheless react to the intensity with which they are rendered. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly