The Horses: New & Selected Poems: New & Selected Poems

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This new and selected brings together a dramatic sweep of poetry from one of the San Francisco Bay AreaAEs best-loved poet-critics. Four of Richard SilbergAEs books are included here, beginning with his first, Translucent Gears, published in 1982, through Doubleness, published in 2000. A previously unpublished long narrative-meditation interweaves a coming-of-age memoir, the Lurianic Cabala, and pure lyrical sections, topped off with a sharp, striking suite of new poems. This is a book that masterfully balances several poetic strains rarely found together in a single body of work. The writing is accessible, presented in the form of narratives, descriptions, and dramatic monologues, but Silberg is also an adept of the image, of the poetic figure that leaps to epiphany. In yet another direction, a number of these poems move towards a kind of pure saying. SilbergAEs puns and language play on themselves at the threshold to philosophy. His sensibility is born out of the counterculture--warm, sexual, mystic, by turns funny, tough, and elegiac. HeAEs a maverick, a singer, and an entertainer who believes in William Carlos WilliamsAE maxim, \u201cIf it ainAEt a pleasure, it ainAEt a poem.\u201d

Reviews

"Dynamic, kaleidoscopic, shot through with a thousand faces and voices too real to be characters, Richard Silberg's work is a Chaucerian pilgrimage to strange and uncannily familiar places--Fremont, the Lower East Side, 'the humped island of Mind.' The Horses is a journey that dazzles wherever it goes as Silberg, 'an ecstatic balding older man / in a striped tee shirt, ' slips into words and finds a way to make them accelerate, plummet, and soar. The goal is a new self, a way to ride out the old isms towards a possible future. The Horses is a deeply serious, wild, and powerful contribution to American letters."
--D. Nurkse

"Richard Silberg is a scat cat razzing and jazzing and boom-shika-booming down the page-stage, because as he says in one poem, poetry is 'not abstract / there's a catness to the sound.' He tosses his lines like chicken bones on the table, and in their gnawed-down economy we can divine the sad and marvelous lives of the lesbian stripper witch, of the Jewish mother and the Gorilla woman, of the be-mused boyman learning the way to 'eat at the world with words' before it eats him and becomes itself ghost world lost in goneness. These poems are timeriffs and deathrants and they are written with a profound humanity, and with a 'crying so deep / it was like coming / bitter crying / crying sweet like milk.'"
--Tony Barnstone

Author Bio

Richard Silberg is a poet, critic, translator, and Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. His poetry book, Deconstruction of the Blues, received the 2006 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and was nominated for the Northern California Book Award. He is the author of Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American Poetry, as well as essaysand several translations, among them The Three Way Tavern, by South Korean poet Ko Un, which won the 2007 Northern California Book Award. This Side of Time, poems by Ko Un co-translated by Clare You and Richard Silberg, is forthcoming from White Pine Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Parthenon West Review, ZYZZYVA, Eleven Eleven, and New American Writing, among many other journals. He lives in Berkeley, California.