
The Guns and Flags Project
Poems
Geoffrey G. O'Brien(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 22. February 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
85 pages
978-0-520-23145-0 (ISBN)
Description
Obsessed with work and dream, shot through with weather and color, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's spirited debut pursues the possibility of the lyric itself - whether the voice raised "with melodies/and thinking" can be rescued from the ongoing disaster of progress. In roving five-beat lines the poems pass again and again through scenes of liminality - sunset and dawn, falling asleep and waking up, border crossings - searching there for a potential ethics and politics of vision, a mutating, rhythmic "project" to oppose the inert spectacle of guns and flags. Like Ashbery stoked on sonics, O'Brien insists that the restless, unsatisfied motion of thought must hold the place for an ever-decaying freedom within the state. Yet it is not idea alone that flares "passionately in our lives," but the smell of rain, the behavior of clouds, repetitions of waves: these are the subjects of a meditative ecstasy that advances The Guns and Flags Project as an inheritor of the Stevensian tradition, charged with a sense that history's never-ending storm of restoration and ruin cannot be outmaneuvered but might be withstood, and even revised, by song.
More details
Series
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 0 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-23145-0 (9780520231450)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poetry has appeared in many journals, including American Letter & Commentary, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Iowa Review, and Volt.
Content
Acknowledgments The Premiere of Reappearance Second Shift Absence of the Archbishop Solubility Isabel's First House Thoughts of a Judge Eloign Early Description The Sentry-Box Parts of a House Tale with a Cascading Moral Excelsior Observations on the Florida Question Reverent Estimations Palinode Two Philosophers Plants Waving in Different Directions ... In the Idle Style The Truth in Italy Standing Before Paintings Constantly So Near An Unusual Optimism Stanzas from Oliveira's Third Dream Man Called Aerodynamics Of a Pressing Nature A Soldier's Uniform The Guestbook The White Mare Sodality Notes from the Trial of K. Vinteuil's Little Phrase Blue Rider School The State's Only Child The State's Only Child Portrait of the X Family Invention of Laughter Second Summer Omerta Winter Rose