Immediate Song: Poems

(Paperback)

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From one of our finest poets comes a collection about timeabout memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world.

Called the poet of things by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if theyve grown obsolescent, even when theyve been forgotten. So objectsrendered in cinematic detailfill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago.

Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. What did they tell me, all those years Bogen writes.Immediate Songoffers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

Reviews

Praise for Immediate Song

The poems in Immediate Song are clear, perfect stanzas containing interior music, a man's conscience, and his crystal reflections. --Washington Independent Review of Books

"From its stunning long poem 'On Hospitals, ' to its unflinching view of life 'in the twilight of empire, ' to its quiet, deft, and subtly lyrical 'song' poems, Immediate Song is at once an extended elegy, a meditation on time, and a hard-won articulation of the largeness of small moments. Simultaneously ambitious and understated, these poems are unmistakably of today's America, even as they mine the timeless concerns of loss and memory. Bogen is a brilliant and singular poet--wise yet unassuming, sharp yet unpretentious--with much to teach us about the complexities of living in the world."--Wayne Miller

"Don Bogen's haunting new book is a sustained meditation on the tension between transience and memory that we experience as time: 'You are in there and it is all gone and there is nothing I can't remember, ' he writes. Rich in observed and remembered detail, the work creates an immediacy that is deeply infused with historical and social awareness. From the elegance of extended discourse to the spareness of song, these poems resonate with exquisite beauty and wisdom."--Martha Collins

"What are we to do with grief and with all actual, abiding concerns when modernity steals such things away into labyrinthine media and into Acherons of bad, banal discourse At such moments, an instance of true feeling becomes heroic. At such moments, memory becomes the most splendid resistance. In Immediate Song, Don Bogen is bold to say 'Permanent' (as in Love) and 'True' (as in Turquoise and Poplar). These are poems of exquisite reproach, and they may well save the day."--Donald Revell

"Energy and elegy suffuse the landscapes of Don Bogen's poems in Immediate Song. The 'song' poems are literally musical while bracingly modern. A long poem in sections on hospitals extends the genre of that subject in American poetry, moving smoothly from acutely observed details to revelations gained through painful experience. Metaphors ring accurate and new. Bogen's meditative realism reveals the ordinary and familiar to us in ways we had not articulated for ourselves."--Lisa Williams

Praise for Don Bogen

"Don Bogen is a wise and playful poet who manages the political and the personal with equal aplomb. He takes hold of poetry, the shape-shifting god, and in his hands it twists, morphs, relinquishes. Bogen reinvigorates the art by defining its limits, then pushing bravely past." --D. A. Powell

"Don Bogen has long been one of our finest poets."--Alan Shapiro

"In [Bogen's] hands, the prose of life turns to poetry of sober dignity, ethical urgency, and wit. He sells nothing short, buys nothing cheap."--Rosanna Warren

"How much, by now, Bogen has made himself the poet of things, how many fruitful and even fretful collisions there can be between the questing mind, the receiving heart, and those objects out there . . . Emerson was right about things being in the saddle--but Bogen holds the reins!"--Richard Howard

Author Bio

Don Bogen is the author of five books of poems, including Luster and An Algebra, along with a critical book on Theodore Roethke and a translation of selected poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Julio Martnez Mesanza. He has collaborated with composers from the United States and abroad. Prizes for his work include a Discovery Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation. He has held Fulbright positions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast and at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo in Spain. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large of the Cincinnati Review and divides his time between Cincinnati and Martinez, California.