Virgil and the Mountain Cat: Poems

by David Lau

Overview

At once uncompromising and highly inventive, David Lau's poems are imbued with a musicality that lightens the dark undertones of spoliation and entropy. Many of the poems embody a nexus of interaction with historical events, films, modernist poetic texts, and works of art—but from this allusion and evocation, a multifarious voice emerges. In these pages, the electric linguistic experiment meets a new urban, postnatural poetics, one in which poetry is not just a play of signs and seemings but also a prismatic investigation of our contemporary order: "Hurry up before our factory leaves. / The first column of the Freedom Tower / traduces its ensorcellment in the facade." Here is a poetry both deeply lyrical and resistant, a poetry relentless in its invention and its stance against the apathy of convention and consumption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520258747
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/02/2009
Series:	New California Poetry , #25
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	955,550
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

David Lau teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cabrillo College. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Wildlife, and other magazines.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I
Prosopopeia
Day to Start on the Floorboards, Rain to the South, Any View a Machine
New Organic Shifts
Suburbatross
Immortality
Going Out
Man with Archiving Machine
Iovis Omnia Plena
Happiness Is for the Terrestre
Many Jasons
Absolute, The
Tell Pearl
The Tupperware Concerto
Black Line Drawing

II
Oil Trees
Awkwardnesses
They Camped for This Day in the Villages Overlooking the Plain of the River
Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film
The Spy's Council of Breezes
Civil War
Yucca Flats
Stag
Metacinematic Skirt Border of a Traumatophile
Parade
Boom Kiss Boom Boom Kiss
Restlessness on the Hummock
To an Ectopic Shepherd
Apotheosis of Groundlessness

III
Tears Open the Sky behind Every Gesture
Now Now There There You Know Her Skirt Settles on a Cow
Vertigo Fastener
Exclusion Act
Scene
Heroes of Our America
Domesticity Effect
July Montaigne
Toward Disunion's Opal
Land Bridge
Extra Strength Resistant Resistance
Songs about the Avant-Garde
Protest in Philippines
Where I Shall Need No Glass
Moved Only by Mechanical Device
The Birth of Reality Out of Appearance
Seiche
Yesterday Lectures
Virgil and the Mountain Cat
Jellyfish

Notes

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"For those willing to experience poetry without requiring a rational explanation, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is filled with shock, curiosity, and delight."—Believer

"Lau's syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent. . . . Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects."—Verse

Editorial Reviews

For those willing to experience poetry without requiring a rational explanation, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is filled with shock, curiosity, and delight.

Believer

Lau’s syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent. . . . Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects.

Verse