Description
Book SynopsisGötterdämmerung is Len Gasparini's fifteenth book of poetry since the early 1970s. What distinguishes this collection from his earlier work is the long title poem: a tour de force that covers new ground in the genre of ecopoetics by launching an acerbic yet lyrical assault on the Anthropocene. Other poems explore such diverse themes as memory, art, and botany. Also included are three literary essays that evince the importance of language and imagination.
Trade ReviewLen Gasparini's poems are sung with passion in a rich, original language. These poems are not pieced dryly together out of what Blake called a 'mechanical talent' for language, they arise unbidden and necessary. -- The Toronto Star
A reading of The Social Life of String will demonstrate what attending to life looks like as Gasparini turns the world into poetry. -- The Pacific Rim Review of Books
"Provocative ... these stories dig into the human condition and leave a lasting impression. -- The Pacific Rim Review of Books
Moving and universal. -- The Toronto Star
Len Gasparini's The Undertaker's Wife is an elegant collection of short stories that are densely layered and rich enough to function almost as mini-novels. Particularly impressive are Frank and Millie, which charts the cross-currents of desire among three young people in 1960s Ontario, and Montego Bay, a traveller's tale featuring a Canadian tourist adrift on Jamaica's mean streets. -- Tom Sandborn, The Globe & Mail
"Gasparini's descriptive skills and psychological insight are repeatedly evident. His dialogue is bracingly candid." -- The Globe and Mail
"Trenchant, sometimes darkly brooding ... Gasparini's stories may take many readers out of the realm of their own lives and, often, out of the usual reader comfort zone." -- The Chattahoochee Review
Götterdämmerung joins a recent body of environmental poetry -- see work by Juliana Spahr and Jorie Graham, among others -- that recognizes the irremediably damaged state of our environment and eschews grand visions of an unblemished nature beyond civilization's reach. It tests the powers of a nature poetry that has abandoned hope for ecological restoration. The poem's kaleidoscopic structure reflects the disorder and disharmony it depicts. An Eliotic shoring of fragments against ruins -- rather than any kind of wholesale renewal of the earth -- seems all that is possible amid the destruction. -- Literary Review of Canada
