Central Air: Poems

by George Bilgere

Overview

With humor and compassion, George Bilgere continues his explorations of the human predicament. The settings of these poems range from Cleveland to Berlin, from childhood to old age. Bilgere’s subject, in the largest sense, is America, in all its craziness, its haunted past, its imperiled future. But what really centers this book is the English language itself, which these poems endeavor to renew, reinvent, and reinvigorate.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822966890
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Pages:	86
Sales rank:	597,655
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

George Bilgere is professor of English literature at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and has received grants and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He spends his summers in Berlin, Germany, but lives during the academic year in Cleveland with his wife and two sons.

Table of Contents

I

Morning, Berlin 5

Polar Bear 7

Anna Karenina 8

No Problem 9

Chernobyl 11

Fourth of July 13

Last Night 14

Stolpersteine 15

The Scar 16

Vespa 17

Deferment 18

Summer Pass 19

Charles Atlas 20

Moxie 21

Touched 23

Because I Could Not Stop for Death 24

II

Central Air 29

Pill Bugs 30

Archaic Poet Looks at God 31

German 32

Hardware 33

How I Met Your Mother 34

Mystery of Jerky 35

Mr. Something 36

For the Slip 'N Slide 37

Surveilled 39

Garbage Disposal 41

Neighbor 42

Red Light, Blue Sky 43

Bee 44

III

Reichstag 47

Narwhal 48

My Last Poem about Breasts 49

Facetime in Covidtime 50

American Masters 52

Misasa Bridge 53

Call of the Fox 54

How Life Works 55

I Heard a Fly Buzz 56

Scooter Scourge 57

Extinctions 59

New Yorker 60

Mars 61

Notes for a Blues Song 62

The Barn 64

Wasserturm 66

Lullaby 67

Ripeness 68

Acknowledgments 71

Editorial Reviews

Central Air is full of melancholy and the awareness of time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, but there are also these moments when the poet can appreciate the here and now. In the poem ‘Reichstag,’ set in Berlin, Bilgere skillfully contrasts the weight of History bearing down on mankind with the simple pleasures a boy can take from the moment before him.” —Lake Poetry

“Bilgere’s writing rewards upon first reading, such is its accessibility, but it continues to reward because the poems are so layered, and their straightforwardness is really a sleight of hand.” —London Grip Poetry Review

“Even if you are already a devotee of George Bilgere, Central Air will startle you with its power. Haunting dispatches from Berlin, droll poems about late fatherhood, cheeky marital love lyrics, searing elegies, and laments for a country ‘growing stranger, less recognizable, more lonely every day’—in these new poems, Bilgere challenges and consoles us in his inimitable voice, achingly funny and unflinchingly tender.”  —Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second
 

“There’s nothing George Bilgere doesn’t take to heart, whether it’s a boy watching his father drink himself to death in a hotel room or a grown man who watches his family at play and marvels at the lucky breaks that have led him to this quiet happiness. Nobody captures the sorrows and beauties of this world better.” —David Kirby, author of More Than This: Poems
 

“Central to George Bilgere’s Central Air is travel and imagination, not being trapped inside all summer, not being trapped in rut. His speaker (or his speaker’s imagination) is in Berlin, Alaska, Saint Louis, Japan, and Vietnam (as it was in the ’60s, as it is now). He pays homage to Rilke and Dickinson. He pays homage to the Slip ’N Slide of yesterday and the Paw Patrol of today. Bilgere is a mature, hilarious poet contemplating his own mortality.” —Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

From the Publisher