Twenty First Century Blues
1st Edition
Published on 30. August 2004
111 pages
978-0-8093-8881-3 (ISBN)
Description
Death, fame, art, and religion become comic subjects in Twenty First Century Blues, the fourth collection from Richard Cecil.Whether elegizing his predecessors, predicting his own end, channeling Dickinson's "e,corpse-eye-view of stony death,"e, or imagining Yeats living in Indiana and dealing with English department politics, Cecil tempers his morbidity with a straightforward, tender brand of humor and a refreshing honesty about the shelf life of contemporary poetry. Deadpan and dark, yet pulsing with the spirit of life, these poems speak of historic France, Italy, and Switzerland, where religious persecutions, ancient catastrophes, and other, less personal, failures overshadow the disappointments and shortcomings of the poet's modern life in the Midwest. Grimly cheered by these revelations, Cecil shows that poets, like cicadas screaming in the summer air, "e,won't shut up until we're skeletons."e,
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Richard Cecil
Twenty First Century Blues
Book
08/2004
3rd Edition
Southern Illinois University Press
€48.51
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Content
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Lament for the Makers
- Lament for the Makers
- Catechism
- Albi Cathedral
- Limbo
- Let's Pretend
- Anti Ode to Autumn
- Discuss "Divine Justice in The Inferno "
- Fool's Gold
- The Funeral Director: Against Cremation
- The Worst Day of the Year
- Portrait of Five Women and a Cat
- The Writing Requirement
- To the Poet Who Skipped My Reading & Died
- A Letter to William Butler Yeats
- 2. There's No Place Like Home
- Package Tour
- There's No Place Like Home
- Almost an Apartment in Antibes
- Evolution in Indiana
- Heaven
- As You Like It
- Let 's Go!
- A Rare Bird
- Where Am I?
- The Tower of Babel
- Internal Exile
- Written in Exile
- 3. A Lesson in Generosity
- Falling Off the Wagon
- A Christmas Poem
- Holy Sonnet
- On Being Asked to Contribute to The Idiot's Guide to Poetry
- Sailing to Pesaro
- 2001: HAL, Meet Dell
- Summer Faculty Enrichment Grant Application
- Meditation on a Half-Line of Shakespeare's
- Letter of Recommendation
- A Lesson in Generosity
- 4. Twenty First Century Blues
- Contrary Elegy
- Summer Diet
- Oona
- Ghosts in the Kitchen
- Roots
- Happy Birthday,Richard!
- The Diver
- Final Exercise -The Rain Poem
- November's Advice
- Flying Home
- Twenty First Century Blues
- Other Books in the Series
- Back Cover
