The World Behind the World: Poems - Hardcover

by April Bernard (Author)

Balancing emotional openness with formal restraint, April Bernard proves once again a poet who "harmonizes the raucous and the classic, the songful and the wry, the courtly and the quick" (Wayne Koestenbaum). Throughout her sixth collection, Bernard searches for "the world behind the world," a spiritual realm of justice and peace, music and grace. The host of saints present in this parallel world includes poets--John Ashbery, Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins--as well as folklore spirits, animals wild and domestic, and personal ghosts.

Mystical, daring, expertly crafted, and ironic, The World Behind the World embarks on a wide-ranging journey through memory and loss to reach "that other world, where nothing human can wreck us." Along the way, the poet conjures lush woodlands and icy oceans, wry conversations with voices from the past, and transformative moments of reckoning and healing. Rising up from despair, anger, and grief, this powerful collection proposes a moving, personal faith.

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Praise for April Bernard
"April Bernard's voice is a voice of one crying in the wilderness... striped with modern despair, loving, and knowing."
--John Ashbery

"A poet of obvious gifts and power and ambition, unsparing and brilliant."
--W. S. Merwin

"April Bernard brings as deep, as concentrated and imaginative, an attention as it is possible to bring to reality, history, the self, and to their triple intersection in our living language."
--Vijay Seshadri

"A marvelous poet.... Bernard excels at depicting impatience, frustration, evasion and defensive invention, along with the quips and recollected details that give these feelings life."
--Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review

"Beneath the astute formal considerations and craft, there's a writer who finds something delectable about the opportunity to shock. In [Bernard's] poems, gallows humor might fade into tender lyricism--or she might leave you hanging.... Few contemporary poets are so articulate about our primitive urges or possess the daring to leap from the top rung of their intellect's ladder."
--Brian McKenna, Rumpus

"At their most electrifying, Bernard's poems portray our physical selves in union with our more rarefied desires for sublimity... admitting playfulness and humor into moments of sobering wisdom."
--Tara Neelakantappa Safronoff, Boston Review