The Double Truth

by Chard deNiord

Overview

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822991182
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/30/2011
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	179 KB

About the Author

Chard deNiord is cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire, Sharp Golden Thorn, Night Mowing, The Double Truth, and Interstate. His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs is a collection of interviews with American poets. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets.

Table of Contents

Contents I What a Doll Am I Trailer Renunciation Club Erebus They Are Most at Home Pitch The Police First Sex April 1 The Return of Jan Weiner Instructions for Telling the Truth The Fire in the Distance The Silence II Ockham Applies His Razor to the Thought of Aquinas What Beauty Knows about Itself From the Curriculum of a Serpent Puritan in Flight At the Socratic Sugarhouse The Bride as Scout A History of Love’s Body The Woe That Is in Friendship Dear George The Soul Addresses Her Beloved in the Non-Green Zone The Only Road Yet so as by Fire Sunday Calls III Coyotes The Thinker The Golden Herd Virgil’s Bees In a Dark Wood Storm Cloud The Percherons The Animals August 17 IV After Marlowe Bare and Live This Ecstasy In the Brief Time We Have Left After the Storm To a Grieving Daughter Pomegranate Memoir Absence Confessions of a Priest All the Unlikeness My Love Is a Leaf The Double Dream of a Grievous Man Enkidu’s Lament Dumuzi’s Lament I Orpheus, I Solomon, I Romeo Memory Is a Fire Eros The Double Truth Curtains Postdiluvian The Mystery Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

‘History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else,’ wrote Octavio Paz, and Chard deNiord’s response to this in The Double Truth is both fascinating and instructive. The voice in these poems seems to have a cunning ability to see oneself as if from a distance. This is compelling, beautiful poetry.”
—Ilya Kaminsky

“Whether the language is rough and obscure or delicate and precise, this is Chard deNiord’s finest book. Philosophical and passionate, he poses this question: Within the enigma of life, how can we know? And who will not remember the ecstasy of love when reading his lines: ‘We were in two places at once like a wire, / stretched out between the cathodes of our / desire. So bare and live the ether / hummed like a swarm inside the air.’”
—Ruth Stone

“Very few contemporary poets render, as uniquely as Chard deNiord does, the sheer wonder of being. Our world shines up from his lines and sentences with all its original splendor and strangeness. In deNiord’s spectacular gaze, old binaries of reality and dream, bitterness and love, joke and revelation, fuse into a beautiful whole. deNiord is a visionary and The Double Truth is a vital book.”
—Peter Campion

“With philosophers and beasts for his confidants, deNiord accesses both eros and cosmos—the far reaches of love and eternity—with a companionable, searing exactness. These are quiet, bottomless poems of true consequence.”
—Robin Behn
 

“Captivates with its lyric language, addressing the ebb and flow of love’s presnece in life, imparting the poet’s insightful knowledge.”

—Prairie Schooner

From the Publisher