Telescope: Selected Poems

(Paperback, Main)

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An original selection of work by one of America's greatest living poets. For over fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. A poet who digs in and thinks hard, a poet who, in the tradition of George Oppen, makes the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, Heller is a writer who returns again and again to his major themes the better to rethink them anew. Those themes include the political and natural worlds and the reponsibility and the freedom of the poet, and Heller often explores them through encounters with key figures in literature and art, such as the painter Max Beckmann and Walter Benjamin. A Jewish poet, a Buddhist poet, a profoundly reflective poet, a deeply sensual poet, Michael Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.

Reviews

"As Wallace Stevens explored the shifting relationship between imagination and reality, so Heller explores the shifting and often uneasy relationship between language and that which it purports to name. Other poets frequently touch upon this problem, but over fifty years Heller has developed a body of work that moves from groping toward the ways in which language helps distinguish self from other to a more sophisticated grasp of how the world is and isnt text." William Doreski, The Harvard Review

In a poetic generation that has frequently settled for small answers, Hellers work insists upon the largest questions. Rain Taxi

Over the past half century, Michael Heller has quietly but emphatically established himself as one of the most masterful poets of a post-Objectivist traditionindeed, as one of the most thoughtful, lyrical, and philosophically profound of contemporary American poets. Mark Scroggins

To conceive otherwise, says Michael Heller, is the poets essential task. No matter if the poem is brief or extended, the line long or short, the setting Manhattan or the Colorado Rockies, a lost Bialystok or an imagined Tibetwhat arises from the page is an action of mind, an asking, questing trajectory, tracked with uncanny surety by movement of the poetic line. This is no language-locked adventure, but an impassioned, ethical listening to the mindand the worldat work in words. Susan Tichy

Tone perfect poemsthe tone, the scale, note by note, interval by intervalattack on the gods of ennui and loneliness. George Oppen

What is sure to strike the reader here is the beauty of the writing. . . . Heller is clearly a poet of considerable range and learning.This volume presents a writer who has charted a clear-eyed path through the poetics of his own time.There is a lot to be learned from it, particularly, perhaps, about what it means to live through ones writing and what that kind of living inevitably entails. Ian Pope,The Manchester Review

Author Bio

Michael Heller has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays, and memoir. His recent works include the poetry collection Eschaton and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry. He is the recipient of several prizes, including awards from the Poetry Society of America and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in New York City and Colorado.