[acornlive] ANNOUNCING: Two New Poetry Collections from SIU Press
Jonathan C. Haupt (acornlive@dublinwriters.org)
Thu, 24 Jun 1999 13:48:34 -0500
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** Two New Poetry Collections from the Southern Illinois University Press **
Contact the SIU Press at 1-800-346-2680 or at www.siu.edu/~siupress
** The Star-Spangled Banner
Poems by Denise Duhamel
"[S]o overwhelming is her relish for life that embarrassment, or
titillation when the subject is sexual, just doesn't stand a chance.
Life-affirming without being treacly, Duhamel is a character who assures us
the world is full of character."—Booklist
The Star-Spangled Banner, Denise Duhamel's sixth book of poems, is about
falling in love, American-style, with someone who is not American.
In the title poem, a small American girl mishears the first line of "The
Star-Spangled Banner" as "José, can you see?", which leads her to imagine a
foreign lover of an American woman dressed in a star-spangled gown. The
misunderstandings caused by language recur throughout the book:
contemplating what "yes" means in different cultures; watching
Nickelodeon's "Nick at Nite" with a husband who grew up in the Philippines
and never saw "The Patty Duke Show"; misreading another poet's title "The
Difference Between Pepsi and Coke" as "The Difference Between Pepsi and
Pope" and concluding that "Pepsi is all for premarital sex. / The Pope
won't stain your teeth." Misunderstandings also abound as characters mingle
with others from different classes. In "Cockroaches," a father-in-law
refers to budget-minded American college students backpacking in Europe as
cockroaches, not realizing his daughter-in-law was once, not so long ago,
such a student/roach herself.
With welcome levity and refreshing irreverence, The Star-Spangled Banner
addresses issues of ethnicity, class, and gender in America.
"Denise Duhamel is heir to both the urbane, campy fortune of Frank O'Hara,
and to Walt Whitman's more commodious open estate. It is the mystique and
absurdity of opening the private experience to the public weal that
triggers and fuels her heroic emotional candor, and in this open air cafe,
she thrives as stand-up, diva, ballerina, and sage. Should someone arrest
her? Yes. Duhamel is the one buying feminine protection in a foreign
country, the one accounting for the cost of her poems, not in angst, but in
paper clips, pens, and ink cartridges. In all of her poems, there is such a
feel of release, of unmitigated joy, that one is surprised to come back
later and find her beautiful and exacting craft. She is one of the most
engaging American poets to have emerged in the last twenty years."—Rodney
Jones
Denise Duhamel 's previous books and chapbooks of poetry include Exquisite
Politics (with Maureen Seaton), Kinky, Girl Soldier, and How the Sky Fell.
Her work has been anthologized in such volumes as The Best American Poetry
1998, The Best American Poetry 1994, and The Best American Poetry 1993.
paper, 64 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2259-5, $11.95
Copublished with the Crab Orchard Review
** In Search of the Great Dead
Poems by Richard Cecil
With grim humor and humorous grimness, In Search of the Great Dead engages
the great themes of poetry: death and fame.
The title poem of this collection records Richard Cecil's quest for the
tombs of the famous dead. At first the search leads him on a tour of famous
European tombstones—the grave of Chateaubriand in St. Malo, the shared tomb
of Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas in Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris,
Yeats's old Celtic cross in Sligo—but gradually it expands into areas where
all the tombs have been erased by time or vandalism—the tombs of Seneca and
Lucan, and all of the great dead poets whose names have been lost. These
once famous, now unknown poets lead Cecil to consider those graveyards full
of anonymous dead—the civil war soldiers buried under tiny stones with
numbers instead of names inscribed on them. Are they more anonymous than
the once famous, now forgotten "great" dead?
Other poems in this collection return to these questions of death and
fame. In "Authors in Hell," Cecil speculates that when he's dead and gone
to Hell, his favorite activity will be reading his own works—just as all
the other authors around him will be reading theirs. In "Living in
Obscurity," he nvisions himself selling, for minimum wage, as a part-time
job, his volumes of poetry at a booth in a shopping mall.
Though Cecil is wryly aware of his own obscurity, his poems are strangely
optimistic and life-affirming. His reply to Emily Dickinson's question:
"I'm Nobody—are you / Nobody, too?" is an enthusiastic yes! In Search of
the Great Dead conveys the joy of being Nobody, and the shy, almost buried
hope that someday (after death), he might become Somebody.
"Richard Cecil's magnificent title poem suggests metaphorically his pursuit
of all things deemed precious and abandoned or lost. It is a serious theme,
and a difficult one to carry off, but Cecil does it again and again,
looking squarely into the depths of experience with a great dry wit, and
without resorting to nostalgia. No small part of Cecil's triumph results
from his uncanny sense of balance and proportion, a gift that is manifest
in both his prosody and his emotive vision. In Search of the Great Dead is
an inventory of obsessions
and hard-won consolations. In poems that range from his satirical take on
realtor-speak to his moving elegy for the poet Lynda Hull, Cecil lives by a
combination of intelligence, craft, and eloquence that can only be
described as character. Perhaps no poet since Larkin has treated the
romance of hope to such a helping of irony and come off in the barely
possible human affirmative."—Rodney Jones
Richard Cecil teaches in the Department of English and the Honors division
of Indiana University. He is the author of two previous books of poetry,
Einstein's Brain and Alcatraz, which won the 1991 Verna Emery Poetry
Competition.
paper, 96 pages, ISBN 0-8093-2260-9, $11.95
Copublished with the Crab Orchard Review
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Jonathan C. Haupt
Marketing Assistant
Southern Illinois University Press
PO Box 3697--Carbondale, IL--62902
PH 618-453-6624 FAX 618-453-1221
http://www.siu.edu/~siupress
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