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The Auroras: New Poems
An exciting, long-awaited collection from the National Book Award finalist, a poet of wild imagination and formidable accomplishment
David St. John's new collection of poetry, The Auroras, is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. Composed as a triptych of three distinct movements, it opens with a sequence of urgent, subversive, se...more
David St. John's new collection of poetry, The Auroras, is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. Composed as a triptych of three distinct movements, it opens with a sequence of urgent, subversive, se...more
Hardcover, 96 pages
Published
March 20th 2012
by Harper
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Some attractions beneath surface irritants
I found this a mixed bag. The poet seems to have developed an off-putting (to me at least) verse formatting style which I found continually and irritatingly distracted from what the poems were really doing. This style consists of (with rare exceptions) omitting all punctuation but capitalizing the beginning of each line, using extra blank spaces within lines, and writing "&" instead of "and".
[Digression: I'm aware that this latter feature is ubiquit...more
I found this a mixed bag. The poet seems to have developed an off-putting (to me at least) verse formatting style which I found continually and irritatingly distracted from what the poems were really doing. This style consists of (with rare exceptions) omitting all punctuation but capitalizing the beginning of each line, using extra blank spaces within lines, and writing "&" instead of "and".
[Digression: I'm aware that this latter feature is ubiquit...more
The Auroras by David St. John is broken into three distinct sections: Gypsy Davy, In the High Country, and The Auroras. In this triptych of poems, “In the High Country” is flanked by the smaller sections “Gypsy Davy” and “The Auroras” but what ties the sections together is not a cohesive story as in Emma Eden Ramos’ Three Women, but a set of emotions ranging from unrest to pain and melancholy. Both expressions of a poetic triptych are effective, but St. John’s is a little more subtle in its atte...more
I arose quite early today. Sipped some puerh ginger tea and proceeded to read this volume in one sitting. Many of the poems left me haunted or desiring for my youth or those idyllic landscapes I was raised in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Some help us to deal with our impending mortality others with the proverbial lost innocence. In all, many topics are covered using wonderful real world imagery and some dream or night time references. This was a great collection, and most of the poems,...more
There's not much I can remember about my time with this book, but that while I was there, I enjoyed myself. David St. John is a beautiful linguistic artist. You really can't go wrong following him into a book.
"Three Jade Dice"
The blonde carrying the tote bag full of bones
Is dressed in a chiffon blouse printed with
Persimmon-colored butterflies
& all across the desert
The sound of
Three jade dice rattling in an old man's palm—
**
I wish I could tell you that it's time for coffee
I wish I could tell...more
"Three Jade Dice"
The blonde carrying the tote bag full of bones
Is dressed in a chiffon blouse printed with
Persimmon-colored butterflies
& all across the desert
The sound of
Three jade dice rattling in an old man's palm—
**
I wish I could tell you that it's time for coffee
I wish I could tell...more
David remains one of my favorite poets--for his eye, for his language, for his sense of line. This book takes a few poems to get ratcheted up (section 1 is a bit abstraction-heavy for my taste...), but once it does, it's a fine fine collection of lyric-meditations that engage the senses, the heart and the imagination.
This 2012 collection is gorgeously written. Lush and deep verse that
transports for the most part. A few poems left me blank, such as
"Shopoenhauer's Dog Collar." But the last ten aurora poems are worth
the book. Lavishly told scenes that astonish. At times the language
overpowers any meaning.
transports for the most part. A few poems left me blank, such as
"Shopoenhauer's Dog Collar." But the last ten aurora poems are worth
the book. Lavishly told scenes that astonish. At times the language
overpowers any meaning.
Lush, evocative, lyrical poems.
The first poem of the chapbook, "The Lake," is exquisite - as is the entire middle of the triptych, the poems under the heading _In the High Country_. But the single finest poem in this book is "The Empty Frame," an unapologetic / nostalgic / boldly sentimental lyric of free verse couplets.
"Opaque" is the first word in the first poem of this book. It describes the entire collection. These poems are easy-going rather than formal and turgid. They may seems light, but they involve the reader and sometimes bowl one over with their beautiful language and deep feeling. A handful of the Aurora poems are as fine as anything St. John has written.
Feb 15, 2013
Liv Lansdale
marked it as to-read
Dec 30, 2012
Joseph
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Rob
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Jul 03, 2012
William
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Apr 29, 2012
Khadijah
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