Blue Pajamas - Poems (Paperback, New)

This first book by UVA English Professor Cushman, the author of two scholarly studies of modern poetry, displays a range of styles and voices: at times studied and somber, Cushman lightens up in poems about nature and family that often gain force through quiet rhymes and regular measures. The writer's subtle shifts in rhythm from poem to poem are in keeping with his Protestant sense of humility - there's nothing showy in these straightforward narratives or gentle sonnets. Having "fussed enough with faith," Cushman tries to come to God through a contemplation of Lee praying for his troops in a Virginia Church. He reveres the dead: soldiers dishonored by the exploitive Civil War photographers in "War, Effect of a Shell on a Confederate Soldier"; F. Scott Fitzgerald, at whose grave he pledges "to misbehave, flap and roar"; and those in his family history: his mother as a young girl praying for her father, dead at Anzio; or a sister who dies at birth (but who speaks in her own voice on Mother's Day). Religious rite commands reconsideration: how communion literally joins us at the lip through the chalice; how the imposition of ashes makes us look anew at dust; how the sudden malfunction of the church organ results in true congregational song. If Cushman's nature poems seem negligible, despite gestures to Marianne Moore and Thoreau, his domestic poetry is superlative: chatty, congenial, and full of the drama of family life. A debut signaling a formidable talent - well worth watching. (Kirkus Reviews)

In the title poem of this impressive debut collection, Stephen Cushman speaks as much of his poetics as he does of his role as father to a young child: ""I perform the offices of comfort / as best I can. . . . I put it all on the line / one piece at a time."" In many poems in this volume, Cushman puts himself on the line with respect to family life, focusing on a parent or grandparent, spouse or child. In others he roams freely among subjects, pausing along the way before photographs from the Civil War, an engraving of Envy, a newspaper clipping about two climbers frozen on a mountain, wolves in a zoo, a woman who directs airplanes in from a runway. Meanwhile, the poems also move from place to place, some lighting in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia, some on the coast of Maine, others looking abroad to an island in Greece. Whether about family, history, religion, travel, or the natural world, these poems blend the everyday with the visionary, combining attention to detail with larger uncertainties. No matter how far a poem may wander in geography or subject matter, sooner or later it returns to the work of performing the offices of comfort, sometimes triumphantly with joy or humor, sometimes reluctantly with an acknowledgment of incompleteness and insufficiency. Finally, at a moment in the history of American poetry when partisans of formal and free verse view each other with mutual suspicion, Cushman's poems demonstrate the pleasures and powers of treating the varieties of verse design as a poet's rightful inheritance.

General

Imprint:	Louisiana State University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	July 1998
First published:	July 1998
Authors:	Stephen Cushman
Dimensions:	229 x 140 x 5mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	56
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-8071-2303-4
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-8071-2303-X
Barcode:	9780807123034

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