O’Brien, Geoffrey G

Berkeley. 2011. February 2011. University of California Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 9780520268876. New California Poetry, 33. The neW CALIFORnIA POeTRy SeRIeS presents works by emerging and established poets that reflect UC Press’s commitment to innovative and aesthetically wide-ranging literary traditions. 102 pages. paperback. Cover photo: Bohemian Grove, c. 1924, James D. Phelan Phtograph Albums, 1902-1929. keywords: Poetry America Literature . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Geoffrey G. O'Brien's third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O'Brien's poems measure the 'vague cadence' of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O'Brien's prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: 'The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun.' inventory #37815 ISBN: 9780520268876.