Winter Amnesties

by Elton Glaser

Overview

Winter Amnesties is a book of origins and endings, griefs and reconciliations. Each poem addresses the dilemma posed by G. K. Chesterton: “One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it.” The poems revisit the past, assess the present, and stare hard into the future. At middle age, Glaser remembers his youth in Louisiana and settles into the long stretch of his adult years in Ohio; he makes his peace with “the life that allows.” As son, as father, as poet, he looks to his legacy, whatever dim remnant of himself might continue after “all flesh falls back to salt and cinder.”

But these are poems of brio and bitter wit, not of self-pity and surrender. They take a jaunty stance towards life and welcome whatever the days may bring, confident that, like crows in the harvest cornfield, we can live on “the shocks and waste of this world” and “wring gold grain from the ruin.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809385010
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2000
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	323 KB

About the Author

Elton Glaser is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Akron and former director of the University of Akron Press. He has published three full-length collections of poems: Relics, Tropical Depressions, and Color Photographs of the Ruins. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1995, The Best American Poetry 1997, Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, and The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Among his awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments One Clearing the Ground Hymn and Field Holler Suppertime Introibo at 5 a.m. Epiphany Stick Dancing Lessons The Summoning Seminary Easter King Cake Party Somniloquy American Flyer Junkyard Blues Winter Inset Cradlesong Two Crows in a Locust Tree Turning with the Animals First Earth Seapiece This Late, This Far Shadows by Giacometti Freefall at Evening Nothing of Ourselves Hibernation Eine Kleine Nachtmusik A Little Daymusic Late Returns in Eden Bird Lady Dog Nights Sunny Side Up Sub Rosa Underfoot Half-Ode at Harvest Three This Is Your Zero Summer Bifocal Long in the Tooth The Effects of Myth at Two below Zero Le Piano Introspectif The Faith of Forty Smoking Dirge in the Chalumeau Register Spry Declensions Refusing October Purge Principles of Conversion Forecasts Last Poem of Summer Deathbed Edition Also in the Series Back Cover

Editorial Reviews

Elton Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement. Glaser cannot keep himself from referencing the whole canon of our poetry, from a Yeats-inflected bit of self-description (the ‘fifty-year-old frowning private man’) to a ripped-off Shakespeare riff. Yet these poems take swings at their own erudition, and Glaser is likely, at those moments where we least expect it, to go at his elegant constructions with the pickax of the common tongue: ‘It’s all over, bud.’ Winter Amnesties seamlessly mixes high culture and low, the ‘glitz and zillion disciplines’ of the universe that Glaser praises. This is an American poetry, a civic poetry infused with enough sly wit to make us root for the oak trees and the stars. These poems also will convince even the most jaded of postmodern readers that Beauty with a capital B is nothing to be ashamed of.”—Lucia Perillo

From the Publisher