Interstate - University of Pittsburgh Press

Interstate

Interstate seamlessly connects the state of knowing, in a worldly sense, to that knowing that is deeply felt yet unbodied. The precise attention to the ordinary things of the world, and in particular to the natural world, gives way to the wisdom of the spirit undergirding these searching poems. Reading them, I felt the delights of language in each new revelation: 'Words were all; / they came to me like birds to a tree.'

Natasha Trethewey

Interstate is a collection of lyrical poems in four sections that concentrate thematically on animals, love and sex, compassion, and loss. A unifying elegiac conceit, even in the more ecstatic and humorous poems, betrays the bittersweet nature of the book’s muse. Alternating between free and formal verse, the poems contain a lyrical tension in which their “broken music” evokes metaphysical paradoxes, romantic humor, and the “dark sounds” that effect what Garcia Lorca called “the power everyone feels” in the mystery of duende “but no philosopher can explain.”

More Praise

DeNiord is a poet who stands firmly in a tradition that weaves Stevens's philosophical daring to Whitman's open and unending heart. Interstate is a gem of a book about the intersection of light and dark, joy and pain.

Jericho Brown

Interstatehas a fierce engine that is both erotic and metaphysical. If readers look down its well and expect to see either their reflection or heaven as separate visions, they'll be disappointed. But if they want to see both, and can live in the shimmer, then this book is for them.

Bruce Smith

Here is a poet who goes again and again to the inherent beauty of nature only to realize human consciousness works like a wedge to divide itself from that which it would love. This is a book of wisdom and affection, and a necessary book.

Maurice Manning

Interstate navigates a world that is at once unsettlingly exterior and interior, as dreams underwrite the conscious perception of a realm equally strange and familiar.

J. Allyn Rosser

Agile, quietly intelligent and steadily pleasurable.

sevendaysvt.com

Table of Contents

Sample

96 Pages, 6 x 8.7 in.

August, 2015

isbn : 9780822963899

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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