Collecting the Animals

by Peter Everwine

The voice of these poems is clear and strong, rising as it does out of the earth to “the celebrations of the reeds,” living simply and daily among cat-tail, wren, peacock, children, women, “praising the coals of heaven” before settling back like the old men of boyhood “wifeless and half wild, / In stained coats, dying like rainbows / from the feet up.” These are poems of the real triumphs we seldom understand, the visions of dawn and dusk over the fields and cities where we live, poems that finally embrace even the emptiness “tasting its bitten face.” The book also includes a group of superb reconstructions of Aztec poems which, like Everwine’s own work, are sometimes so quiet they are merely a man speaking as plainly as he can of why he lives, and so exact as to be a poetry known long before poetry. That is why they are among the best we have today.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Peter Everwine was born in Detroit and raised in western Pennsylvania. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Listening Long and Late (2013), Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time (2003), and Collecting the Animals (1973), which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. In a review of the collection Keeping the Night, the editor of the Olives of Oblivion blog noted Everwine’s “uncanny ability to combine the abstract with the real” through his juxtaposition of “sparse style” and “dense images.”

He is the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. His poetry has been featured in the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, and others. He also translates poetry from the Hebrew and Aztec languages.

He has taught at the California State University, Fresno, and Reed College. He lives in Fresno, California.

Reviews

[Cooper Renner]

Very much of their time, not unlike poems by Wright, Bly and even Strand abut.

[Kelsey Williams]

Everwine mixes abstract with reality very well, “Sometimes at night / when the city breathes against my window / and my hand closes like a stone, / I seek you down the acrid street of dead fathers / or in the dark lakes of the child I was.” This mixture is what I believe adds that mysterious quality of I’m not really sure what is going on, but I want to find out to his poetry.