Listening Long and Late

by Peter Everwine

Overview

"What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened 'long and late' to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same 'deified heart' that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and Nahuatl, as if all the poems belonged to the same poet, which they in fact do, as the glorious multitudes of Peter Everwine, one of the masters of our age."—Chard deNiord

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979104
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/28/2013
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	808 KB

About the Author

Peter Everwine is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including From the Meadow and Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. Everwine is the recipient of numerous honors, including two Pushcart Prizes, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is emeritus professor of English at California State University, Fresno, and was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Table of Contents

Contents Song Part I. The Migration of the Turkey Buzzards A Story Can Change Your Life Another Spring Sorrow Song Of Zarathustra Lines Kiski Valley: Looking For Old Miners Lament For The Dead Princes Elegy For The Poet Charles Moulton Even Friendship Making The Circle The Girl On The Bullard Overpass Night Crawlers Lessons Part II. The Beginning Of Country Music Orpheus Laments Accordions Lament Prankster Song One For The 5-String The Banjo Dream The Shirt Rich Man The Moment To A Water Snake Homage To Tu Fu Concerning The Disappearance Of The Nightingale Part III: Traces Hear I am The county highway My five year old In time We ride a long time They lost the grandfather He felt confused A cold overcast morning The room was dark The people in old photographs in 1937 California was another one You see them Part IV. After The Funeral The Rag Rug The Formula To Po Chü-I He Alone Poem On My 79th Birthday The Snake The Canyon Where Is That Road The Train Station Of Milan Rain Aubade In Autumn Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened ‘long and late’ to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same ‘deified heart’ that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and Nahuatl, as if all the poems belonged to the same poet, which they in fact do, as the glorious multitudes of Peter Everwine, one of the masters of our age.”

—Chard deNiord

“The poems in Peter Everwine’s Listening Long and Late are woven out of memory and mystery, with surprising translations from the Nahuatl and Hebrew. Everwine is a faithful listener, always keeping ‘one ear cocked for the unsayable.’ These elegiac poems murmur and sing and celebrate the most humble creatures among us.”

—Anne Marie Macari

Past praise for Peter Everwine
“[Everwine’s] poems . . . possess the simplicity and clarity I find in the great Spanish poems of Antonio Machado and his contemporary Juan Ramón Jimenez but in contemporary English and in the rhythms of our speech, that rhythm glorified.”
—Philip Levine, Ploughshares 



“Unnervingly articulate on every page. Everwine is an everyman voice filtered through a good scholar’s wisdom. His ear is firmly to the ground but his brain knows what Zarathustra mused. . . Sublime work by a learned and generous heart.”
—Today’s Book of Poetry

Past praise for Peter Everwine
“Peter Everwine is a poet’s poet, the kind of writer other poets read with equal parts of envy, gratitude, and joy. . . . [His] poems are crystalline, pared to essentials; they are heartrending, and they are beautiful.”
—Gary Young

From the Publisher