In this Book
- Playful Song Called Beautiful
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
- Series: Iowa Poetry Prize
summary
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful.
From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.
From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- How to Know Two
- p. 1
- The Idle Hours
- pp. 7-9
- A Philosophy of Gravity
- pp. 15-16
- Disagreeable Things
- pp. 17-18
- The One Thing
- pp. 19-21
- What Happens to the Future
- pp. 22-24
- The Truth You Heard
- p. 25
- Sleeping Dogs Lie
- pp. 26-27
- Goethe’s Apple
- pp. 28-31
- Three Quarks for Muster Mark
- pp. 32-36
- A Song on Geronimo’s Grave
- pp. 37-42
- The Law of the Excluded Middle
- pp. 43-44
- Hard Pearl
- p. 45
- The Lesser Poet
- pp. 46-47
- And Yet It Moves
- pp. 48-49
- The Lost Children
- pp. 51-52
- The Thing Itself Speaks
- pp. 53-55
- What We Want
- pp. 56-57
- Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit
- pp. 58-63
- Evil Pockets
- pp. 64-68
- The Ghosts of Birds
- p. 71
- Why You Leave
- p. 72
- What is Left
- p. 77
- Dog Dreams
- p. 78
- Mésalliance Grotesque
- pp. 79-80
- Turing Lies with Men
- pp. 81-82
- Blood Rain at Stoke Edith
- pp. 83-85
- Here Where We Are Terrible
- pp. 86-89
- The Things You Can’t Keep
- pp. 90-93
- Shooting Dove
- p. 94
Additional Information
ISBN
9781609384005
Related ISBN(s)
9781609383992
MARC Record
OCLC
939553435
Pages
111
Launched on MUSE
2016-02-21
Language
English
Open Access
No