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A Brief History Of Time (2009)

by Shaindel Beers(Favorite Author)

4.5 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1844715051 (ISBN13: 9781844715053)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Salt Publishing

review 1: I think I'm in love with "The Calypso Diaries" :"Sometimes you let him go because it's more cruelthan keeping him.Sometimes you let him go because freedomis the opposite of love.Sometimes you let him go because freedomis the only love.Sometimes you let him go because there is onlyone Penelope.Sometimes you let him go because there is only one Calypsoand you know that he will think of her more oftenfrom across the sea."Also, I admire the sestinas, especially "For Stephen Funk, in Prison for Protesting the Iraq War" and "Why It Almost Never Ends With Stripping" - if I ever teach again, I'll be using these as great examples of the form.
review 2: I was astonished by the breadth, humanity, and craft of these poems. Shaindel is one of my goodreads friends, but she's... more one of those friends I've exhanged hardly two words with, so I'm not glowing with praise out of obligation. These poems are good.The range alone is incredible. There's free verse, poems with long lines, poems with short lines, and even a ghazal, an underutilized form that is perhaps my favorite (Jim Harrison excels at the ghazal). And there are two sestinas. I've heard poets say that once you choose the six words, it's like pedaling downhill, and while I'll take their word for that, I still suspect the sestina is a cruelly difficult form. Beers' "Summer 2000 Sestina" is especially moving, exquisite.A good number of poems call to mind Philip Levine for me, not in an imitative sense, but rather in their unpatronizing devotion to a blue collar world and, more importantly, in their unadorned simplicity of diction and syntax--chrystalline, straightforward sentences that can stun in an instant like an intake of breath on a bitter winter day.Beers also has an accomplished use of extended metaphor, as in the marvelous "Belonging," and many of these poems lead to perfect endings that are surprising yet inevitable: "A Man Walks Into a Bar," "Sleeping Man and Woman, Circia 2000 C.E.," and the especially fine "Rewind," come to mind.There is also, throughout the poems, an uncommon breadth of erudition across a variety of fields--physics, zoology, botany--but it's never intimidating or alienating, just deftly used. Some poems miss the mark, but that's true of all collections. What I relish most about these poems is that while they're not sentimental at all, they're often plaintively, poignantly nostalgic, sometimes for a time and place, a mood or feeling, that you sense the narrator knows no longer exists, if it ever did. less

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