David Biespiel
Список книг автора David BiespielThe Education of a Young Poet
"Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the “pattern and random bursts that make up a life.” His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming-of-age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, «in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same.»
Republic Café
Inspired by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour , and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer’s Baltics and Yehuda Amichai’s Time , Republic Café is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history’s tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of our human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting.A single sequence, arranged in fifty-four numbered sections, Republic Café details the experience of lovers in Portland, Oregon, on the eve and days following September 11, 2001. To touch a loved one’s bare skin, even in the midst of great tragedy, is simultaneously an act of remembering and forgetting. This is a tale of love and darkness, a magical portrait of the writer as a moral and imaginative participant in the political life of his nation.
Charming Gardeners
The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel�s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America.Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.These poems explore the �insistent murmurs� of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America�s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals � all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel�s �own original grand style.�I should stop back thereAnd stand on both feet in the grazing sunlightAnd hear this chorus of America singing.But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered.from �TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA
Wild Civility
David Biespiel�s long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line «American sonnets» promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. «I�ve come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds,» says Biespiel, «something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine.»The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel�s increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.
