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Wild Civility

David Biespiel author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Washington Press

Published:1st Oct '03

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Wild Civility cover

The third volume in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series features the work of Oregon poet David Biespiel

Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, the author's innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse.

David Biespiel’s long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I’ve come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."

The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.

Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel’s increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.

"[Wild Civility] demonstrates the poet's deft control of line and sentence..Poems such as 'Under a Blossoming Plum Tree' or 'Shoulders' are sparse, free verse lyrics concerned with exterior landscape and quiet observation—smart counterpoints to Biespiel's reinvented sonnets. They allow the reader a moment to breathe, reflect, and appreciate the dynamic personality of Wild Cilivity."

* Rain Taxi Review of Boo

  • Commended for Oklahoma Book Award (Poetry) 2004

ISBN: 9780295983516

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 318g

80 pages