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
Wild Civility

Wild Civility

Biespiel, David

Paperback

Series: Pacific Northwest Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.95

ISBN10: 0295983523
ISBN13: 9780295983523
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Oct 1 2003
Pages: 69
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.12 Depth: 9.14
Language: English
Awards: Oregon Book Awards

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line American sonnets promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds, says Biespiel, something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine.

The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.

Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.

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