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Carregando... The Uncertainty Principlede Mark Kraushaar
Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  GregoryHeath | Feb 6, 2013 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. In his splendid new collection, Mark Kraushaar addresses a tentative and awkward, sometimes funny though frequently heart-breaking struggle to find a path to meaning in the world, a task made more difficult still by the struggle itself. In Cake a man arriving too late for his own small birthday party, unable to cajole his exasperated and saddened wife and daughter into staying, watches them exit the diner in which the three have met, then finally opens a book. As the waitress approaches, the narrator asks, "And what in Hell is he reading?" Towards the end of Chiropractor Claims to Travel Through Time (a poem inspired by an AP story), the central character observes of his father, "He tried, I know, / but every evening / watching him watch the tv / I wondered what clues had eluded him. / Constricted, uncontent, incomplete, / what secret had he missed?" "Once a student told me her father said that when older people cry, they're weeping because the world is beautiful--they already know it's sad. Mark Kraushaar's poems, too, look beyond the sorrow and find instead a world that's almost unbearably lovely. I fell hard for Falling Brick Kills Local Man, Kraushaar's first book; I have an even bigger crush on this one."--David Kirby "A bell goes tolling over the landscape of Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE and its burden is Moment, moment... The word keeps recurring in this engrossing collection. Kraushaar sometimes seems temperamentally as much short story writer as poet (something to be regretted only by those who would keep poetry pure of life's muddy complexities), and many of his poems offer rich, beguiling, abbreviated narratives. The book abounds in character revelations perhaps too modest to be called epiphanies--but moments, even so, whose unlikely glimmerings are welcome and illuminating."--Brad Leithauser "Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE is the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, 'linear' or predictably 'conventional.' These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for. The sensation of time is Kraushaar's ultimate subject, but he approaches time so imaginatively, so freshly, through such a detailed range of voices and occasions, in poems that unfold in such surprising yet inevitable ways that one feels as if every other possible subject for a poem--love, death, the struggles of dailiness, the fear of loss, friendship and work, childhood, contingency, and lack of faith--has been woven into the netting of this one obsession. This is a book to be enjoyed and savored, to be read with pleasure and gratitude, to be learned by heart."--Alan Shapiro Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (5)
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At its heart, 'The Uncertainty Principle' is a fatalistic work, dealing with the challenges of living in 'the bone weary, wounded world'. There's an inevitable cynicism in these poems, exemplified in 'Now Playing', which sees a young soldier heading off to war, his head full of the things he intends to do upon his return. 'Of course,' says our narrator, 'we all know he's shot dead or loses his legs... If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.'
This dark undercurrent flows throughout the length of the book, but above it there's a gentle humanity. 'The Fallout Shelter Handbook', which describes a recollected discussion of the proposed building of a fallout shelter around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, reads as a tribute to Kraushaar's father and an affirmation of basic human decency in the face of cold logic. Sitting around the dinner table, discussing plans for the shelter, the children raise concerns for their neighbours. What if they were to need somewhere to shelter? 'We would let them in,' says the father, despite his wife's objection. And what about their friends, and the Johnson twins, and the local bully? 'We would let them in.' And the brother's pet snake, and the sister's cat? 'We would let them in.'
It couldn't possibly happen, of course, but that's not the point. The protagonist in this poem, as in most of the pieces in this collection, has a choice in how he reacts to the senselessness and sadness of the world. It's a choice we have, too - we can succumb to despair, or we can respond with 'a sort of mild, unaccountable calm'. The suggestion, implicit in almost all of these poems, that we take the latter option, strikes me as a pretty good idea. (