Book Recommendation: Philip Brady's The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics

Philip Brady's The Elsewhere:  Poems & Poetics is a collection aimed at eternity.  Brady's new and selected provides an unabashedly bardic synthesis of the smoking girders and brickwork that make a life in poetry. Ranging from Queens to West Cork, from Youngstown to Lagos, The Elsewhere negotiates the landscape between recollection and release, between art and life, between impulse and sudden song: "I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. / But memory's a muscle letting go." The essays on poetry, and the poetry itself, are Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday.  The Elsewhere is everywhere ambitious, but more importantly, its poems and prose dwell in a kind of singing that begins in the forever that is right here.    

This is the perfect book to pick up during national poetry month; it makes me wish there were more New and Selected collections that featured essays on poetics alongside the poetry. I'd like to see the same kind of book from contemporary poets who write incisive prose (like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Zucker, Tracy K. Smith, Nin Andrews, Martín Espada, David Lehman, Terrance Hayes, William Heyen, H.L. Hix, and on and on and on...).

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend whole-heartedly Brady's ambitious poetry and erudite prose. ~DD

Comments

[Ursula Levin]

I'm looking forward to Brady's poetry and "erudite prose." And I love your list of poets in parentheses.

[Tony Paris]

The sentence that ends like this is a rhetorical knockout

<<< Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday.>>

even if I can't follow the metaphor after "spirals." Thumbs up!

[Dante Di Stefano]

Thank you Ursula. Those poets in parentheses are my heroes. And thank you for your kind words, Tony. The metaphor does get a bit mixed after "spirals," but the enthusiasm remains clear! ~DD