The Double Truth - University of Pittsburgh Press

The Double Truth

'History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else,' wrote Octavio Paz, and Chard deNiord's response to this in The Double Truth is both fascinating and instructive. The voice in these poems seems to have a cunning ability to see oneself as if from a distance. This is compelling, beautiful poetry.

Ilya Kaminsky

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

More Praise

Whether the language is rough and obscure or delicate and precise, this is Chard deNiord's finest book. Philosophical and passionate, he poses this question: Within the enigma of life, how can we know? And who will not remember the ecstasy of love when reading his lines: 'We were in two places at once like a wire, / stretched out between the cathodes of our / desire. So bare and live the ether / hummed like a swarm inside the air.'

Ruth Stone

Very few contemporary poets render, as uniquely as Chard deNiord does, the sheer wonder of being. Our world shines up from his lines and sentences with all its original splendor and strangeness. In deNiord's spectacular gaze, old binaries of reality and dream, bitterness and love, joke and revelation, fuse into a beautiful whole. deNiord is a visionary and The Double Truth is a vital book.

Peter Campion

With philosophers and beasts for his confidants, deNiord accesses both eros and cosmos—the far reaches of love and eternity—with a companionable, searing exactness. These are quiet, bottomless poems of true consequence.

Robin Behn

Captivates with its lyric language, addressing the ebb and flow of love's presence in life, imparting the poet's insightful knowledge.

Prairie Schooner

Table of Contents

Sample

96 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

January, 2011

isbn : 9780822961345

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Chard deNiord is cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire, Sharp Golden Thorn, Night Mowing, The Double Truth, and Interstate. His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs is a collection of interviews with American poets. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets.

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