"Renunciation" introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air." The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of "Renunciation" with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.
Reviews / Votes
"A densely imagined and richly felt poetry where abstractions are clothed in flesh and blood." -- Eugene Weekly ADVANCE PRAISE "By some process that seems magical Corey Marks can enter the lives of others--the famous and the anonymous--and remain himself in a voice so singular we learn to trust it totally. This is what the new century's poetry will sound like when it is written by someone truly gifted and compassionate. Marks believes so completely in the power of the imagination his words can burn you." -- Philip Levine "What has been renounced ... is that stiff-necked assertion of self which makes for our discomfort in the presence of so much ambitious new poetry. Here, everything, however high it aspires, is tractable and, in the loftiest sense, free. However exalted, the poems take their meandering ways with a certain ease, the release (and the relief) afforded by a man who knows not only his own mind but his own measure." -- Richard Howard "Corey Marks has the superb ability to create delicate and strong bridges of narrative poems that combine intellectual acuity with emotional involvement." -- Adam Zagajewski
Series
Language
Place of publication
Target group
Professional and scholarly
ISBN-13
978-0-252-02581-5 (9780252025815)
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Schweitzer Classification
