The Auroras
Description
An exciting, long-awaited collection from the National Book Award finalist, a poet of wild imagination and formidable accomplishment
David St. John's new collection of poetry, The Auroras, is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. Composed as a triptych of three distinct movements, it opens with a sequence of urgent, subversive, sensually charged poems, crackling with desire.
In the center section, St. John returns to the California landscapes of his youth, in both the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These poems are quiet and measured, yet often psychologically troubling.
The final section of The Auroras is constructed as an album of philosophical and aesthetic meditations, all haunted by the force of an emerging sense of mortality. In this collection, even the most compelling emanations of light—artistic, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual—are inevitably framed by impending darkness.
The beauty, music, and artistry of David St. John's poetry have been long admired; now The Auroras reveals the extent and breadth of his masterful poetic achievement.
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Person
David St. John is the author of eleven collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for the National Book Award in poetry) as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews titled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is University Professor and chair of the English Department at the University of Southern California, and lives in Venice Beach, California.