In this Book
- Gold Bee
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: Southern Illinois University Press
- Series: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
summary
In his collection Gold Bee, Bruce Bond takes his cue from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, bringing a finely honed talent to classic poetic questions concerning music, the march of progress, and the relationship between reality and the imagination.
Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life: “The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels.” At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond’s poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths.
Addressing broadly ranging topics—from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad’s wind machine—Bond’s voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has “the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.”
Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life: “The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels.” At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond’s poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths.
Addressing broadly ranging topics—from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad’s wind machine—Bond’s voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has “the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.”
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- Part I
- The Invention of the Harp
- pp. 10-11
- Bone Flute
- p. 12
- The Invention of Polyphony
- pp. 16-17
- Semper Fidelis
- pp. 21-22
- Part II
- Prima Materia
- pp. 27-29
- The Paintings of the Chauvet Cave
- pp. 30-31
- The Underground Railroad
- pp. 41-43
- Golden Ratio
- pp. 45-48
- Part III
- A Bridge Made of Water
- pp. 51-56
- Part IV
- The Progress
- pp. 64-66
- Wind Machine
- pp. 70-71
- Angel’s Trumpet
- p. 75
- The Bells of Prague
- p. 83
Additional Information
ISBN
9780809335336
Related ISBN(s)
9780809335329
MARC Record
OCLC
954481563
Pages
96
Launched on MUSE
2016-08-05
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2016