Böcker av Paul Zimmer

"Paul Zimmer, long one of America's finest poets, turns out to be a comparable master of prose. In his wonderful book of memory and reflection he has written with exquisite elegance and tenderly brilliant observation about his past, and by his genius he evokes a reader's past as well. This book is as haunting and lovely as a late-night train whistle from the far horizon." - Robert Olen Butler; "Over the years Zimmer's poems have consistently been full of good sense and buoyant humor. Now he has kicked it up some notches and, using his poetic skills, made this sad, funny, quite serious book of prose about trains, childhood, war, education, drinking, jazz, wooden sheds, grass, elephants, the moon, blues, horses, sickness, and so many other things that come together as a satisfying whole. It is a great pleasure to turn these lyrical, finely-written pages." - Annie Dillard; "Here is an American life remembered faithfully, tellingly, and offered the reader in a compelling, affectingly lyrical voice that touches the mind and heart, both. Here is story after story become, in sum, a rendering through personal expression of a country's ongoing history. Here is, finally, an autobiography become a literature of social reflection." - Robert Coles; "This deftly written collection satisfies one of our deepest curiosities: 'What's it like being her? Or him?' Paul Zimmer's answer takes us there by way of steam engines, gray foxes, dray horses, Big Joe Turner, a French dentist tres sympathetique, tumbledown shacks, Duke Ellington's riffing to empty seats, and a fellow poet heroically obscure, except in Zimmer's moving homage. To know ourselves we people-watch lifelong, yet glean only vague suppositions. In contrast, these quietly impressive sketches - so much bigger than their pages - add up to a self portrait humane and intimate as kinship." - Reg Saner"

Offering a look at the work of Paul Zimmer, this work contains twenty-three poems.

Looking back at a lifetime of rich experience from Wisconsin’s driftless hillsWe all dream of finding the place we can be most ourselves, the landscape that seems to have been crafted just for us. The poet Paul Zimmer has found his: a farm in the driftless hills of southwestern Wisconsin, a region of rolling land and crooked rivers, "driftless" because here the great glaciers of the Patrician ice sheet split widely, leaving behind a heart-shaped area untouched by crushing ice. After the Fire is the story of Zimmer’s journey from his boyhood in the factory town of Canton, Ohio, and his days as a soldier during atomic tests in the Nevada desert, to his many years in the book business as a writer and publisher, and the rural tranquillity of his present life.Zimmer juxtaposes timeless rustic subjects (tending the land, country people and their ways, the ever-changing beauty of his natural surroundings) with flashbacks to key moments: his first and only boxing match, hearing Count Basie play and discovering his lifelong love of jazz, his return to the France of his ancestors, his painful departure from the publishing world after forty years. These stories are full of humor and pathos, keen insights and poignant meditations, but the real center of the book is the abiding beauty of the driftless hills, the silence and peace that is the source of and reward for Zimmer’s hard-won wisdom. Above all, it is a meditation on the ways that nature provides deep meaning and solace, and a consideration of the importance of finding the right place.