Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is
a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must
first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection,
readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful
and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting
inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a
multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai
to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin
Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.
"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries
the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not
surrender the young poet s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom.
Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from
a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo,
archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often
hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the
traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an
ambient drone part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.
Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the
charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous
voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque
and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of
confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return
that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes,
"When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the
necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we
could say.""
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
