Search results for ""Author Baron Wormser""

Formally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual. In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable characters—we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south. As Wormser’s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel, where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems—poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.

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Baron Wormser, a master of the persona poem, is well known for his empathic exploration of possible lives. This fifth collection of poetry by this "fiction writer in a poet's body," includes an examination of his own life as well.Mulroney & Others provides glimpses of Wormser's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, as well as accounts of Vietnam vets and draft dodgers, socialites and outcasts. Loyal readers will welcome his trademark poise, the elegant balance he achieves with understatement both metrically deft and intellectually intricate. These poems prove Anaïs Nin's insight that "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."Wormser's invitation to engage ourselves in seeing is irresistible, especially as he models the process with such impassioned interest. "'I know,' everyone is saying at once/To one another and the word-riddled universe. . . ." he writes. His poems tempt us to trade the obscurity of facile assumption for the powerful illumination of wonder. In Wormser's words, the universe is irrefutably personal.Baron Wormser is the author of four previous collections of poetry: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), Good Trembling (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), Atoms, Soul Music, and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions, 1989), When (Sarabande Books, 1997), and co-author of Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Paris Review, Sewanee Review, The New Republic, Harper's, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives with his wife in Hallowell, Maine."The particular gift in Wormser's work is in the narrative. . . . He is poised to record, to expose, to express, not to pounce. The language can sometimes ambush a reader with wonder, but Wormser never breaks a sweat. . . . Mulroney & Others is one of those rare books of poetry that will have resonance in the lives of nearly every reader. . . (he) mixes just the right amount of cleverness with a smart appreciation for language, humor, humanity, pain and love."-Ba

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A fifth collection by this "fiction writer in a poet's body."

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A new edition of an evergreen back-to-nature book in the tradition of Thoreau. For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the “back to the land” movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither a statement nor a protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled into a life that centered on what Thoreau would have called “the essential facts.” In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. Lovely and rich, The Road Washes Out in Spring is an immersive read. A new preface by the author rounds out this new edition.

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“[Baron] Wormser is a beautiful writer of the meditative-narrative poem in the compassionate and lucid style of Frost, Hayden Carruth, and Donald Hall. Like those writers, his poems dignify rural lives, but also explore the national soul with particularly American integrity and frankness. Conversational, civilizing, thoughtful, and often funny, too, there are many extraordinary poems in these Scattered Chapters.”—Tony Hoagland Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir. He directs the Frost Place Conference and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program. He served as Poet Laureate of Maine and now lives in Vermont.

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