There is no finished world : poems / by Stephen Corey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Corey, Stephen, 1948-

Language:

English

Physical Description:

86 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First ed.

Place of Publication:

Buffalo, NY : White Pine Press, [2003]

Summary:

In poems that are relentlessly introspective yet never trivial, Corey delves into human experience at its most potent moments and shows us that the large questions are best considered within the context of the most minute details. When, as an editor and sitting in a hospital keeping a death watch, he addresses a poet whose poem he has rejected because it doesn't rise to the emotional level of the situation, he says, "I'm sure/ you're thinking this private critique unfair, / and you'd be right to be upset, except/ that you'd be wrong. This place, right here, is where/ we always meet: Beatrice with her chart/ devoid of final blessings, you and I/ searching for the words that nail sensation to the sky.

Contents:

Knotter 11

Understand

Forgetting Mortality 15

Employment 16

A String Around Your Finger 18

The Sounds of Those Faithful 20

"Walk-ins Welcome" 21

Trailer on Trailer on Trailer 22

What I Don't Understand 23

What the Road Said 24

What the Eagle Said 25

One Answer 26

Universe 27

Poems of This Size

Poems of This Size 31

Carpe Diem 32

The Boy Scout's Motto Explodes 33

Black Hole 34

20th-Century Skepticism, or, Another Idea Succumbs to Art and Truth 35

Style 36

Know 37

Strengthening the Myth 38

Editing Poems During a Hospital Deathwatch 39

Measures

Measures 43

Living Hands 44

One Night in Lima 48

1998: One Hundred Years Together 49

Who Would Not Seek the Perfect Gesture of Love? 51

Mortal Fathers and Daughters

Anything 55

Death Tricks 57

My Daughter Playing Beethoven on My Chest 58

Notes from the Year of My Father's Dying 60

Apology to My Daughters, 20 and 17 62

Called Forward 64

My Daughters' Photograph as a Bookmark in Howl 65

No Beauty 68

Dirt 70

To My Daughters at My Death 71

Stone as Stone

Abjuring Political Poetry 75

The Drive to Work 76

Seattle Merry-Go-Round 78

Two Views of Charles Burchfield's Six O'Clock: For Adults: Where the Painting Is 80

For Children: The Painting Comes Home 81

The Ghost of the Poet 82

Emily Dickinson Considers Basketball 83.

Notes:

Poems.

ISBN:

1893996689

OCLC:

53014757