Search results for ""author robert pack""
The University of Chicago Press Clayfeld Holds On
from "Clayfeld's Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack" Beneath this mellow harvest moon, I can still picture you-a boy content just fishing with his father from a ledge above a foaming stream. The flailing trout you caught is packed in gleaming ice; the pink stripe all along its side is smeared across black shiny dots that seem to shine with their own light. I'm sure that you can picture me with equal vividness, and though we're not identical, there is a sense in which I am inventing you as much as you're inventing me. In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack's doppelgA nger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self. Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld's formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.
£18.81
The University of Chicago Press Laughter Before Sleep
One of America's most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, "Laughter Before Sleep", Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music. "Laughter Before Sleep" weighs the nature of endings from the perspective of old age and embraces the humor and play of memory that keep mortality at bay. As we are carried along with Pack's lyrical, sensitive, and intelligent verse, he takes us on a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life. In the opening section, Pack composes poems that meditate upon a sense of his own diminishing and the meaning of absences. The middle sections form episodes of a memoir in verse, moving from family to history and back again, reflecting on the power of anecdote to shape a life in retrospect. With the final section, Pack recalls his unfulfilled plan to raise penguins in Montana, offers a panegyric on Darwin's nose, and makes the mistake of trying to impress a police officer with a book of poems. Filled with charm and wit but also with philosophical melancholy, "Laughter Before Sleep" is a superb addition to the poet's oeuvre.
£25.16
The University of Chicago Press Elk in Winter
Robert Pack is a narrative master blessed with a keen ear for everyday speech. In poems that recall Robert Frost's meditative regard of nature, Pack's newest collection, Elk in Winter, asks what meaning can be found in a seemingly indifferent universe. But as always for Pack, universal questions find their resolution in the particular, the personal, and the intimate. With this focus, Pack's essential meditative stance challenges and enlarges itself - a man watches himself watching the landscape, through which a herd of elk passes on a winter morning: "As silence deepens / Into deeper thought / the watcher, unresistant to the spell / His watching adds to the still woods, / hears footfalls softly / Crunching in the shadowed snow, / step upon sure unhurried step." This rich and varied volume moves from comedy to elegy, from lyric to narrative, in which individual characters are revealed and rendered symbolic by the stories that enclose them. Pack locates beauty, consolation, and even happiness in those commitments that we will into fulfillment in awareness of loss: "Your absence is as bright / as sunlight on the sea, / illuminating the receding depths of air, / blue fading into deeper blue as if / some random thought of fading blue / extended everywhere." What finally unites the poems of Elk in Winter is Pack's desire to appeal to the ear as much as to the heart, and to discover and reveal the passionate music of ideas.
£25.16
