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
The Keeper's Voice: Poems

The Keeper's Voice: Poems

Carson, Mike

Paperback

Series: Southern Messenger Poets

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $20.95

ISBN10: 0807136182
ISBN13: 9780807136188
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: May 1 2010
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.24 Width: 5.42 Depth: 8.76
Language: English

Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem Muse hears from her Those words, iron twang of loss, that cut soft ideas of beauty out. Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness.
Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms -- blank verse, quatrains, sonnets -- the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister's belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull.

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