Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Blue Pajamas: Poems

Blue Pajamas: Poems

Cushman, Stephen

Hardcover

Series: Poetry

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0807123021
ISBN13: 9780807123027
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Jul 1 1998
Pages: 56
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 5.70 Depth: 9.34
Language: English

In the title poem of this impressive debut collection, Stephen Cushman speaks as much of his poetics as he does of his role as father to a young child: I perform the offices of comfort / as best I can. . . . I put it all on the line / one piece at a time. In many poems in this volume, Cushman puts himself on the line with respect to family life, focusing on a parent or grandparent, spouse or child. In others he roams freely among subjects, pausing along the way before photographs from the Civil War, an engraving of Envy, a newspaper clipping about two climbers frozen on a mountain, wolves in a zoo, a woman who directs airplanes in from a runway. Meanwhile, the poems also move from place to place, some lighting in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia, some on the coast of Maine, others looking abroad to an island in Greece.

Whether about family, history, religion, travel, or the natural world, these poems blend the everyday with the visionary, combining attention to detail with larger uncertainties. No matter how far a poem may wander in geography or subject matter, sooner or later it returns to the work of performing the offices of comfort, sometimes triumphantly with joy or humor, sometimes reluctantly with an acknowledgment of incompleteness and insufficiency.

Finally, at a moment in the history of American poetry when partisans of formal and free verse view each other with mutual suspicion, Cushman's poems demonstrate the pleasures and powers of treating the varieties of verse design as a poet's rightful inheritance.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

General Poetry

View All