
Call Waiting
David C. Ward(Author)
Carcanet Press Ltd
Published on 29. August 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-84777-226-8 (ISBN)
Description
The first full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward, Call Waiting combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America - its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees ('Case closed. / No body was ever found') to Ward's own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 USA and its self-deceptions: 'He knew what he knew and / did not know / what he knew was / not America'.
Reviews / Votes
'These graceful, powerful poems catch the reader's attention at every turn. Memories of family, flashbacks of place and deft images of civic life grow through craft and music into powerful self-questionings about purpose, mortality and even art itself. This is a memorable and moving book and these are poems to savour and re-read.' --Eavan BolandMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84777-226-8 (9781847772268)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Person
David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004) and (with Jonathan D. Katz) Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010). His exhibition Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets opened at the NPG in Autumn 2012. His pamphlet of poems Internal Difference was published by Lintott Press in 2011 and his verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011).