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The Silence Teacher
(Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series #6)
by
Written in the seven years following the death of the author’s infant son, these poems explore the sometimes quiet and often startling nature of love and grief. Through a range of forms and panoply of figures—spiders, fish, a famous cellist, and prophetic apparitions—this collection probes what William Faulkner called, "the human heart in conflict with itself."
Chapbook/Pamphlet, 32 pages
Published
March 18th 2013
by Poetry Salzburg
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I really love this little book. It meets me at many levels. The writing is clear so I understand, deep so I am moved, intelligent so that I feel challenged and inspired, and eloquent so that I experience beauty and truth... not that those two are separable, or so said someone once.
I already knew that these pieces came over seven years, but if I hadn't known, I might have guessed based on how rich it is. Seems like a thousand pages worth of bright agony and dark agony and love and ache and sweetn ...more
I already knew that these pieces came over seven years, but if I hadn't known, I might have guessed based on how rich it is. Seems like a thousand pages worth of bright agony and dark agony and love and ache and sweetn ...more
The complexity of grief is difficult to articulate. It often leads us to silence. But in this powerful collection of poems, Peake permeates that silence and emptiness one encounters after a significance loss, and he does so with elegant language and precise attention to form. Throughout the book, the enduring presence of the speaker’s lost infant son calls the speaker, and ultimately his reader, to revere the sacredness and brevity in all life.
From the back cover:
"The Silence Teacher is entirely remarkable for its dignity, its beauty, its many strengths of word and of witness. Robert Peake’s lines and images polish the hardest of grief-stones until it gleams, until it becomes almost bearable to hold. Here is poetry’s task and gift to us–untransformable loss made malleable and sustaining by the ways it is met, said, and seen."
-Jane Hirshfield
"If one locked a mute into the bell of a trumpet, changing the color of its song, its spectral...more
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Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London. His new full-length collection Cyclone is available from Nine Arches Press. His previous collections are The Knowledge (Nine Arches Press, 2015), The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013), and Human Shade (Lost Horse Press, 2011, part of New Poets, Short Books, Volume V).
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