Immediate Song

Poetry

Immediate Song

Poems
“Unmistakably of today’s America, even as it mines the timeless concerns of loss and memory.” —WAYNE MILLER
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From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world.

Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago.

Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

ISBN:
9781571314819
Publish Date: 
03/12/2019
Pages: 
96
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
5 oz
Author

Don Bogen is the author of five books of poems, including Immediate Song​, Luster and An Algebra, along with a critical book on Theodore Roethke and a translation of selected poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large of the Cincinnati Review and divides his time between Cincinnati and Martinez, California. 

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