Book
What about this : the collected poems of Frank Stanford / Frank Stanford ; edited by Michael Wiegers ; introduction by Dean Young.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781556594687 (hardcover)
- Physical Description: xv, 747 pages : facsimiles, portrait ; 24 cm
- Publisher: Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2015]
Content descriptions
| Summary, etc.: | ""I don't believe in tame poetry. Poetry busts guts."-Frank Stanford. The poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career. Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life-and his suicide before the age of thirty-has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now. This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera. As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost." When It's After Dark I steal all the light bulbs and hide them like eggs in a basket going to some outlaw I put on the best I can find I cover them with a swatch of something that swells like a bite that bleeds green cloth that smells of a feed store but looks to of been worn I go over to nasty willy's bridge and throw them into the creek there in the shade I listen for them to make nests to escape agony and burst. Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi and worked as an unlicensed land surveyor. He published poetry, short fiction, and the epic 15,000-line poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. In June 1978, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. "-- Provided by publisher. |
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| Subject: | American poetry > 20th century. |
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Publishers Weekly Review
What about This : Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
In this comprehensive and essential retrospective, the body of work left behind by Stanford-who took his own life in 1978, at age 29-more than makes good on his insistence that "poetry busts guts." The volume presents a vital and distinctly American surrealist impulse, as Stanford, whose legacy is somewhat obscured by his extensive self-mythologizing, fearlessly explored the terror and wonder of the mind and the physical world. Published and unpublished poems coexist alongside excerpts from his 15,000-line epic, "Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You," as well as selected bits of energetic prose and other ephemera. In the course of reading, one witnesses the prismatic and visionary effects of his imagination on a richly figured world of Southern objects-knives, rivers, boats, cypress trees-where the moon can be everything from "a dead man floating down the river" to "dead fish" to the "blind eye of a fish/ in the back of a cave." What he sings here is a "song that comes apart/ Like a rosary/ In the back of a church"-an unlikely triumph of imagination over pain and death. Stanford demanded of poetry that it "mean and sing," and this is the definitive document of his uncanny ability to do just that. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Library Journal Review
What about This : Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Starred Review. Stanford was a legend even before his tragic suicide at nearly 30 in 1978, a charismatic author of vivid, rushing verse that's grounded in his Mississippi childhood ("I am a son of the river") and Arkansas adulthood. At his death, he left behind ten volumes of poetry and so many loose pages of poems they could have filled another ten volumes; his magnum opus, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, explores the South's racial divide in 15,000-plus fantastical lines. Michael Wiegers, executive editor of Copper Canyon, began thinking about Stanford's work in 1997 and has spent the last five years creating this masterly anthology, which can't begin to collect all that Stanford wrote but offers sumptuous servings of both his published and archival work, with Battlefield excerpted throughout. Often working through simile ("The moon wanders through my barn/ Like a widow heading for the country seat") and crescendoing lists ("I know the girl feeling the kiss of the mirror// I know the bracelet on the wrist in the tomb"), Stanford's poems capture delta life but aren't countrified, instead using distilled language to tell stories at a distinct slant. VERDICT Highly recommended work from an American original; for any serious poetry collection. [See Editors' Spring Picks, LJ 2/15/15, p. 34.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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