Almanac : Poems / Austin Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Austin, author.

Series:

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets ; 63

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (93 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2013]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land. This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To "e another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.______ From Almanac: THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM Austin Smith ? Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks or the molds of busts donated by the Art Institute of Chicago to this dying town's little museum, there was a mummy, a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit room by himself. I used to go to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh who, expecting an afterlife of beautiful virgins and infinite food and all the riches and jewels he'd enjoyed in earthly life, must have wondered how the hell he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois. And I used to go alone into that room and stand beside his sarcophagus and say, "My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

The Silo

Queen-Anne's Lace

Fort-Da

Thistles

The Night My Mother

How a Calf Comes into the World

Lightning

Autumn's Velocity

The Brinkmeiers

Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972

Dean

Coach Chance

The Man Accused of Fucking Horses

The Bait Shop

Memoir of My Imaginary Sister

Neon Apotheosis

Bingo

Stephenson County Fair in Wartime

Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970

Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb

The Battlefield

The Pit

The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson

Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants

Sharpener of Knives

Overlord

The Hotel

The Equation

Resonance

Postcards to Andrew Wyeth

Recollection

Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota

On a Greyhound Bus in America

Mission

The Scythe

The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum

Sirens

A Serious House on Serious Earth

Poem for Les, Homeless

Elegy for Missing Teeth

Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips

The Trencher

Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down

The Key in the Stone

Wake

Notes

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9781400848034

1400848032

OCLC:

857278631