Sign-In
Cart
Remembering Lethe: Poems
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $29.95
ISBN13: 9781773491196
Publisher: Able Muse Pr
Published: Mar 22 2022
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
With remarkable erudition, the poems in Brian Culhane's Remembering Lethe explore the way classical history and legend may illuminate modern life. Thus the title poem links a son's poignant visit to his mother, suffering dementia, to the myth of Lethe, the river in classical mythology from which dead souls drink to forget their past lives. A pervading theme is the might and character of literature itself, and how it can lead to deep personal insights and beauty, even in the midst of wars, political repression, and censorship. This insightful and masterfully crafted collection is a worthy finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award.
PRAISE FOR REMEMBERING LETHE:
Brian Culhane is a poet whose work leaps across classical myths and World War II history; across poetic forms that shimmer with innovation; across loss and love and the deep river of Lethe, the river in Hades that causes forgetfulness. In our culture, in this time, we forget a lot of things. You'll perhaps cross the abyss / Between words, though no margin of safety's promised us, Culhane writes, and the journey of Remembering Lethe is one into a language and imagination so alive and generous that it beckons to, and then surprises and engages, every reader. This book is a consolation and an inspiration.
-Frances McCue, author of The Bled
Brian Culhane's poetry is a form of knowledge, and its truth and beauty as art would be recognizable at any time, in any era. The title Remembering Lethe presents us with the riddle of poetry itself. Lethe, the classical river of forgetfulness, may erase the memory of everything except the very poetry that created it. Reflecting a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, the poems in this book merge with their subjects in classical proportions, formed by a lyric impulse the poet calls in one poem two parts darkness, one part song. Darkness may sometimes shadow these poems, but joy illuminates each of them in the end.
-Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry
In A Crack in the Amphora, just one of the many formally masterful, richly probing, and movingly resonant poems in Remembering Lethe, Brian Culhane enjoins the reader to squeeze your eyes through / Past the dry outer world of painted clay, to find a corridor leading away / From light, into the interior the sculptor's palm knew / As wet, before any votive oil splashed in. Here, in a manner exemplary of this poet's ingenious imaginative powers, the poem opens to a world vital with allusion and pervasively attuned both to the core of darkness and to the world at hand with which, as he says elsewhere, the longhand of thought also must contend. Culhane's poems are unapologetically literate, inclusive in their pursuit of emotional and intellectual truth, and rare in their responsiveness to what is most necessary for the art.
-Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brian Culhane's The King's Question (Graywolf Press, 2008) won the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson Award for a first book by an author over fifty. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as the Hudson Review, the New Criterion, the New Republic, and the Paris Review. After getting his MFA at Columbia University, he received a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington, where he focused on epic literature and the history of criticism. The recipient of fellowships from Washington State's Artist Trust, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, he now divides his time between New York's Catskills and Seattle.
1 different editions
Also available
Also from
Culhane, Brian
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover