Discount Price: $11.95
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Usually ships in 1 to 2 months
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN num: 9780887482816
ISBN number: 0887482813
Label: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Manufacturer: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Quantity: 1
Printing Date: 1998-07
Publishing house: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 307842
Studio: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Harms writes poems that find magic in the mundane of everyday life. On the surface, one sees relationships with others and events that are not earth shaking; however, the power of poetry -- or any writing, for that matter -- rests solely in details. His poems are filled carefully wrought images brimming with subtlety and understatment. Many poets have problems with the universal. Many poets try to address the whole complexity of human experience, which results in abysmal failure. Harms avoids this, as his poetry is far from epic. Yet, the best way to speak to a larger issue is focus on a smaller story. Harms does this and more.
Rated by buyers -
Jim grows as a poet in his new book the joy addict. While his poetry still contains the same vaporous sense of the sublime and the ethereal, he has found a unique way to portray emotions through images. Jim writes about people holding hands with the ghosts of memories. He shows us our nightmares, fears, hopes, and dreams.
Who could forget the image in "Sky" as an adult and a child dance on a tree stump? "There will be room enough to dance with one so small/ And when she asks how tall it was/ the bluegum eucalyptus that held and hid/ the stars I looked for from my/ bedroom window, and caught the few that fell,/ it will be easy enough just to point/ to a particular spot in the sky."
Jim talks about our attachment to nature, and the way that nature saves us. The tree catches the falling star like a shepherd going after the lost lamb. Jim's poetry also offers strong contrasts. Even in the midst of the desolation and ruin of a shanty town in "Reel around the Shadow," there is "an insomniac hosing his pansies on a fire escape," and the angels on the roof are never very far away.
Rated by buyers -
I was fortunate to have James Harms as a professor in college. He was just beginning work on "The Joy Addict" at that time -- though "Modern Ocean" had already been released. Simply stated, "The Jpy Addict" is Jim's collective soul. It's bits and pieces of rock n' roll imagery, submersed against the pains and tribulations of lost love, family matters, innocence, guilt and joy.
Rated by buyers -
No poet of his generation captures and comes to uneasy terms with contemporary ennui better than does James Harms. Beneath a deceptively simple narrative surface, these poems bubble up from within with lyric intensity and continue to reward with each re-reading. The book is impeccably paced, moving with grace and muscularity from poem to poem; the moody malaise of some lines, "I drove yesterday as if to somewhere. / I spun the dial left to find a song./ And the space between stations / was a thousand throats clearing, / the sound a phone makes / when you've answered out of habit / or hope and no one's there, / it hasn't even rung," are tempered with lines no less resigned perhaps, but imbued with faith in human gesture and touch: "We keep our arms around each other when we can, / struck and stranded. When we can, we never let go." Suspicious of the simply uplifting, James Harms rather gives us the actual, the human, and we leave the poems nodding yes, it's like that, and I can't wait to touch someone I love: "If we open the door and a window, / perhaps a breeze will lift away the dust, / though I feel light enough still to blow loose / out of my body. Now that we're okay, there's very little / that keeps us here, which is why, perhaps, we stay. / I no longer hear the leaves as voices gathering / beneath the trees, in the gutters. / But I would recognize your heart if I saw it."
Find other books like this one:
