Immediate Song: Poems - Paperback

by Don Bogen (Author)

From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time--about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world.

Called "the poet of things" by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they've grown obsolescent, even when they've been forgotten. So objects--rendered in cinematic detail--fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago.

Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. "What did they tell me, all those years?" Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

Author Biography

Don Bogen is the author of five books of poems, including Luster and An Algebra, along with a critical book on Theodore Roethke and a translation of selected poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza. He has collaborated with composers from the United States and abroad. Prizes for his work include a Discovery Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation. He has held Fulbright positions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast and at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo in Spain. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large of the Cincinnati Review and divides his time between Cincinnati and Martinez, California.