Come Shivering to Collect: Poems

John F. Pleimann

ISBN 10: 1725278812 / ISBN 13: 9781725278813

Editore: Slant January 2021, 2021

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Titolo: Come Shivering to Collect: Poems

Casa editrice: Slant January 2021

Data di pubblicazione: 2021

Legatura: Paper Back

Condizione: Like New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto:

The poems in John Pleimann’s Come Shivering to Collect live and move and have their being in a world that is both twilit and sacred. Speakers wrestle with memory’s power to obsess and distort, to haunt, and to evoke. They discover that life mocks happiness, and the only thing sacred is to be vulnerable.

The voices in these poems look for salvation in the seasonal aisle at Walgreens, in stray dogs that never come home, in the destitute and downtrodden, in the dead, who—in T.S. Eliot’s words—seem stuck in a “time of tension between dying and birth.”

Belief in the power of words to heal—and a profound fear for what they veil—propel these poems. As one persona says: “What don’t need no grammar saves you.”

The speakers here muse on what words are after, as if they have lives of their own: “There’s nothing words can’t keep from you, no emptiness / around you words can’t flesh out. . . .” What’s the poet to do who suspects words know more than he does, that words follow him, hollow him, and fill in what he lacks?

These poems reveal that we are words on our knees “come shivering to collect.”

Informazioni sull?autore:

John Pleimann is a former advertising copywriter and English professor. He holds an MFA degree from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry Daily, Natural Bridge, The Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, and The Connecticut Review.