Winter Amnesties

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poetry “Elton Glaser’s poems are classic in the best sense of the word: he achieves stateliness without stuffiness and form without confinement. Glaser cannot keep himself from referencing the whole canon of our poetry, from a Yeats-inflected bit of self-description (the ‘fifty-year-old frowning private man’) to a ripped-off Shakespeare riff. Yet these poems take swings at their own erudition, and Glaser is likely, at those moments where we least expect it, to go at his elegant constructions with the pickax of the common tongue: ‘It’s all over, bud.’ Winter Amnesties seamlessly mixes high culture and low, the ‘glitz and zillion disciplines’ of the universe that Glaser praises. This is an American poetry, a civic poetry infused with enough sly wit to make us root for the oak trees and the stars. These poems also will convince even the most jaded of postmodern readers that Beauty with a capital B is nothing to be ashamed of.” —Lucia Perillo Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron and former director of the University of Akron Press. He has published three full-length collections of poems: Relics, Tropical Depressions, and Color Photographs of the Ruins. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1995, The Best American Poetry 1997, Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, and The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Among his awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. CRAB ORCHARD AWARD SERIES IN POETRY Printed in the United States of America Cover photograph: David Lorenz Winston Cover design: Erin Kirk New Southern Illinois University Press p.o. box 3697 carbondale, il 62902-3697 www.siu.edu/~siupress isbn 0-8093-2305-2 Betty Greenway ...