Walking Theory

by Stephen Vincent

Poetry. "...these are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his entire life. They definitely pass the 'take the top of your head off' test. I went cover to cover without even sitting up"--Ron Silliman. "Stephen Vincent's observant, large-hearted poems bundled into book form, engaging architecture, people on the move, the seasons and other transience, the talk that binds the Goodbye, rhetoric, the desperate,/what can the poem do, walking, witness, suffer, hope. Urbane and companionable, rare virtues flaunted here, curbside delight"--Bill Berkson.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau derives “saunter” from Sainte-Terrer, the medieval wanderer lit out for the Holy Land. Walking Theory moves Thoreau’s etymology forward into 21st-century San Francisco, where apparently erratic movements through space and time reveal their purpose mostly backwards, via memory. Vincent’s walks around the city he grew up in are occasions for reminiscence and elegy, meditations on aging parents, growing children, and lost friends. The conceit of the walk gives Vincent a way to celebrate the pleasures of the haptic and incidental while evoking a larger shape—journey, nostos (root of ‘nostalgia’) or pilgrimage—to contain the patterns of human connection and loss revealed over the course of a lifetime. The result is a series of understated, deeply felt poems that speak directly about the wisdom latent in attentive indirection.