Death of a Dissembler
Book Details
Author(s)Andrew Frisardi
PublisherWhite Violet Press
ISBN / ASIN0615926347
ISBN-139780615926346
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank3,216,692
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Be prepared to find a surprising galaxy of images, dictions, themes and poetic forms among these pages, along with resins of the classics everywhere. Add wit, sensitivity, humor and the recurring shock of recognition, then sit back and enjoy what Andrew Frisardi has prepared for you. Then come back and taste again for the sheer pleasure of the company.
--Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey and Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.
If poems are etymologically "things made," then the poems in Andrew Frisardi's Death of a Dissembler are exquisitely made things, many angled and shining brightly. They are textual equivalents of "green fire from Venus," as we memorably hear of in "The Jewelers," a central poem here. Ear, eye, and mind do their elegant, exact work. Consider the lovely sonic solemnities of "Rosemary," the Frostian "Song," the title poem with its haunted music, or the wit and punch of "Gibbous," whose moon is a "jealous seed of sun gone cold, / a decrepit has-been fellow." Throughout this collection, Frisardi's potent seeing repeatedly makes a "small thing big"--as when kids surround a soccer ball like antibodies around a germ, or bees plunge into blossoms and in their moving become a "tree's flourish." The mind, too, shines out and is shone upon, most pleasurably here (with a Marvellian pleasure) in "The Ideal" and "A Contemplative Considers Show Biz." Give me most of all the contracted lyrical intensities of "Phenomena," with its meditation on practically everything of importance to us--perception, experience, life's brevity, the pleasures of the physical world and hope in some unknown possibly beyond it, and, most fittingly of all, the artist's earnest promise of efforts and a flinty intention that they will succeed. And they do.
--Brett Foster, author of The Garbage Eater and Fall Run Road
--Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey and Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.
If poems are etymologically "things made," then the poems in Andrew Frisardi's Death of a Dissembler are exquisitely made things, many angled and shining brightly. They are textual equivalents of "green fire from Venus," as we memorably hear of in "The Jewelers," a central poem here. Ear, eye, and mind do their elegant, exact work. Consider the lovely sonic solemnities of "Rosemary," the Frostian "Song," the title poem with its haunted music, or the wit and punch of "Gibbous," whose moon is a "jealous seed of sun gone cold, / a decrepit has-been fellow." Throughout this collection, Frisardi's potent seeing repeatedly makes a "small thing big"--as when kids surround a soccer ball like antibodies around a germ, or bees plunge into blossoms and in their moving become a "tree's flourish." The mind, too, shines out and is shone upon, most pleasurably here (with a Marvellian pleasure) in "The Ideal" and "A Contemplative Considers Show Biz." Give me most of all the contracted lyrical intensities of "Phenomena," with its meditation on practically everything of importance to us--perception, experience, life's brevity, the pleasures of the physical world and hope in some unknown possibly beyond it, and, most fittingly of all, the artist's earnest promise of efforts and a flinty intention that they will succeed. And they do.
--Brett Foster, author of The Garbage Eater and Fall Run Road
