Description
Book SynopsisTraces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. This title offers the opportunity to experience a poet's evolution and to follow a creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution.
Trade Review"Bruce Beasley is not quite like anyone else, and his progress has been dazzling to follow, one of the most satisfying growths into a major poetic presence . . . I have witnessed. . . . [His] ability to transubstantiate pain and loss into spiritual wonder is not to be missed."
* Field *
"Bruce Beasley has crafted a piece of supreme symmetry. . . . Signs and Abominations is the present and future of poetic, theoretical thought; it is indeed the best road map yet for divining the mysterious relationship between the human and ethereal energies."
* Contemporary Poetry Review *
"Surprisingly moving and personal. . . . nuanced, playful, almost brutally frank, the early poems establish Beasley as a poet to be watched, and now the reader watches as they move-surely, inexorably-toward their metamorphosis. . . . A quick dip into the content reveals something else: an energy so compressed it is ready to spring forth, transforming itself in the process. Story and song and query and lung breathe at the core of these poems; they are exhaled— physically— as the (nearly) visible product of a mind ceaselessly roaming at the corridors of meaning, restlessly pacing the halls of experience, hacking away at convention and correlation, fiercely flying in the face of tradition. And to what end? To make, as he has, an amalgam of flesh and spirit, profanity and profundity, of such equal parts that it is impossible to distinguish the ordinary from the astonishing."
* Georgia Review *
"Startling, original . . . the monstrous and the divine flee from and chase one another throughout this fugal, challenging new book by one of our most stylistically and thematically intrepid young poets."
* Virginia Quarterly Review *
"In poem after poem in this book . . . the effect is stunning. [This] is an important first book by an extremely talented young poet, a gift to us all."
* Quarterly West *
"Spirituals is a book of apprenticeship in which one can see the potential for genius in the retelling of the old stories."
-- Mark Jarman * Hudson Review *
"Bruce Beasley is a refreshingly physical poet. . . . [He] has a good ear, essential to a poet, and sometimes his music is superb, almost as good as Yeats. . . . Beasley transforms longing into the ground of faith itself."
-- Kathleen Norris * Books and Religion *
Table of ContentsINITIALS
from Spirituals (1988), The Creation (1994), and Summer Mystagogia
Witness
The Creation of Eve
Eve, Learning to Speak
Childhood
Indian Summer
Summer
The Instrument and Proper Corps of the Soule
At Easter
The Reliquary
Novice
The Cursing of the Fig Tree
Eurydice in Hades
Sweet Repeaters
Summer Mystagogia
Primavera
Ugly Ohio
Idaho Compline
Arcana Mundi
Advent: Snow Incantation
Doxology
The Monologue of the Signified
from A Mythic History of Alcoholism
After an Adoration
Sleeping in Santo Spirito
A Dogwood Tree in a Country Graveyard, at Easter
Ultrasound
Before Thanksgiving
Going Home to Georgia
The Conceiving
EXTREMITIES
from Signs and Abominations
What Did You Come to See
Negatives of O'Connor and Serrano
Hermetic Diary
Hermetic Self-Portrait
Mutating Villanelle
Errata Mystagogia
from Spiritual Alphabet in Midsummer
from The Mosntrum Fugue
MORTOGENESES
The Corpse Flower: New Poems (2006)
The Corpse Flower
Is
Not Light nor Life nor Love nor Nature nor Spirit nor Seblance
nor Anthing We Can Put into Words
And Go into the Street Which Is Called Straight
The Craps Hymnal
Lord's Prayer
Rotbox
Mortogenesis
The Vanishing Point
Acknowledgments
About the Poet
