Böcker av David Biespiel

Inspired by Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, and sharing the spirit of Tomas Transtromer's Baltics and Yehuda Amichai's Time, Republic Cafe is a meditation on love during a time of violence, and a tally of what appears and disappears in every moment. Mindful of epigenetic experience as our bodies become living vessels for history's tragedies, David Biespiel praises not only the essentialness of our human memory, but also the sanctity of our flawed, human forgetting.A single sequence, arranged in fifty-four numbered sections, Republic Cafe details the experience of lovers in Portland, Oregon, on the eve and days following September 11, 2001. To touch a loved one's bare skin, even in the midst of great tragedy, is simultaneously an act of remembering and forgetting. This is a tale of love and darkness, a magical portrait of the writer as a moral and imaginative participant in the political life of his nation.

Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, this book explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, DC, the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California.

Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, the author's innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse.

David Biespiel's energetic language, so varied and musical and precise, is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets. The Book of Men and Women is his second collection in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and as always he is the master of the long line, his words strung across its reach as tightly as beads. But new poems in this book explore the intimacies of the shorter line as well and display Biespiel's formal inventiveness and emotional range.The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social and historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men and women that is promised in the book's title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, "e;William Clark's Sonnets."e;The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing, as well as the other poems in this remarkable volume, showcase Biespiel at the very top of his form.