Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems

by Lawrence Raab

Overview

A poem by Lawrence Raab is a carefully chosen and precisely rendered moment—a poised and elegant meditation on the nature of memory. This new collection includes a selection from each of Raab's five previous books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems. Readers will delight in their wide-ranging subjects, from "Miles Davis on Art" to "Saint Augustine's Dog," from the inventions of Rube Goldberg to the recklessness of dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101177143
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/25/2003
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	391 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lawrence Raab is Professor of English at Williams College, where he has taught since 1976. He is the author of four previous collections of poems, most recently What We Don't Know About Each Other, winner of the National Poetry Series and finalist for the National Book Award.

Table of Contents

Visible SignsNew Poems
Why It Often Rains in the Movies
In Dreams
Inside the Chateau: A Pornographic Story
The Invisible Hand
Some of the Things My Mother Said
Miles Davis on Art
My Father Drives Away
Letter
Tarantula
Vanishing Point
Winterset
Small Ghost Poem
Talking to the Dog
The End of the World
Dark Matter
Camouflage
Damage
Saint George's Dragon
Rube Goldberg's Flower
Saint Augustine's Dog
Request

From Mysteries of the Horizon
The Rules, the Story, and the Way Out
Voices Answering Back: The Vampires
Magritte: The Song of the Glass Keys and the Cape of Storms
To Lorca
Seven Charms for a New Day

From The Collector of Cold Weather
Visiting the Oracle
Water
The Assassin's Fatal Error
Attack of the Crab Monsters
Doctor Watson's Final Case
The Blue Histories of the Wind

From Other Children
A Night's Museum
What We Should Have Known
For You
Two Clouds
A Familiar Story
On the Island
Scene from a Novel
The Witch's Story
Night Song
The Room
Cold Spring
Listening to a Certain Song
Other Children

From What We Don't Know About Each Other
A Crow
What We Don't Know About Each Other
Lies
Learning How to Write
The Shakespeare Lesson
The Bad Muse
The Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window
What He Thought About the Party
The Uses of Nostalgia
Happiness
Magic Problems
Daily Life
Stories in Which the Past Is Made
At Evening
Marriage
What I Forgot to Mention
The Secret Life

From The Probable World
Why the Truth Is Hidden
Love
Respect
American Light
A Small Lie
All Day
The Lost Things
Why Tragedy Is the Wrong Word
Years Later
In the Garden
"My Soul Is a Light Housekeeper"
Great Art
Another Argument About the Impossible
Hunters
Performance
My Life Before I Knew It
The Invisible
The Pole
Fragile
Emily Dickinson's House
False Nocturne
The Question Poems Ask
My Spiritual Life
The Best Days
My Life at the Movies
Vanishing

Editorial Reviews

Gathering work from five previous volumes with new poems, this selected shows film, landscape and art as recurring subjects for Raab, but only as vehicles to access the internal realm: "today, when I saw / how tenderly the light was moving among those trees / I thought of you." The earlier work here provides some relief from the general uniformity of the collection's plain style: Mysteries of the Horizon (1972) and Collectors of Cold Weather (1976) betray an early interest in surrealism, as well as a deep inheritance from Williams-style imagism. By 1987's Other Children, Raab has settled into the familiar poetic terrain of the first-person meditation; ruminations on the everyday world of walking the dog and watching the sleeping child dominate. His last two books, the National Book Award-nominated What We Don't Know About Each Other (1993) and Probable World (2000), continue in this vein: "You open the thermos of coffee. / It's Saturday. This is happiness, you think." The new poems are likewise concerned with the daily epiphany: One poem asserts, "How easily we can make ourselves sad/ just thinking. How little/ that buys us." But unlike Billy Collins's fairly thoroughgoing domestic optimism, Raab's sensibility is at heart resignedly and reluctantly dissatisfied: "Most of it/ is done already... yours/ is the same old life a thousand people/ had the good sense to keep to themselves." The work is not ambitious, but it is sincere and well-crafted, or, as one poem murmurs: "The studied poverty of small observations." (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Raab here gathers selections from his five previous collections (e.g., The Probable World) and juxtaposes them against 21 new poems. After reading these works, two things come to mind. Because they seem dreamlike, "unfamiliar territory opens around us"-as in an intimate conversation about death between the speaker and his daughter, who asks, "When I die..../ will I still have my fingers?" Conversely, the poems can seem ordinary and recognizable, as when "from a branch/ a crow takes flight" or footprints are observed in overgrown grass. Regardless of which direction Raab takes his reader, the language and diction are simple and streamlined. The subtle images complement the tone and meter employed throughout. There's no overwrought use of poetic elements; the poems catch one's attention like a whisper that intrigues. It's as if they scream quietly. Highly recommended, especially for academic libraries.-Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal