Tombo

(Hardback)

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Explosive language, rough sensuousness, and an unflinching eye - here is a poet who doesn't look away and is committed to poetry's first purpose: to bring song. Tombo is a book of lyrics fueled in equal parts by realism and big-fish storytelling, a book of wanderers, foghorns, summer rain, feral cats, and city jazz. Built on heartbreak particulars,

Reviews

"Di Piero's poems have become more personal just as they have risen from the ground (of Philadelphia, of San Francisco) into the empyrean. These 'little astonishments' take on a body just as the ink hits the paper. Almost by themselves. A superb poet." --Gerald Stern "W.S. Di Piero writes so beautifully, so evocatively that I lose hours happily in his work. These poems will wash you out to sea and you won't even notice until you lie back on your raft and take a long, hard look at the sun." --Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby "These startlingly fresh poems concern themselves with the world-in-motion, life 'lived in its transitions,' where even in the stillness of night the imagination 'rushes toward the world.' Di Piero's poems relish the exactly rendered specifics of San Francisco, but--like Cavafy's Alexandria--his city is the locus of memory and meaning and desire. He occupies it so fully, in this indelible book, as to become one of its permanent citizens." --Mark Doty "These rich, luscious, sinuous poems may be the best Di Piero has ever written. Reading them is like being returned to a neighborhood you once walked through, or dreamed about, or lived in, or saw in a movie--most likely years ago, most likely a place you believed you had lost forever--and being granted (by who knows what merciful or mischievous demigod) the ability to view them more vividly and movingly than you ever could before, through a sensibility far more acute and attuned than what human beings are used to. If your heart doesn't break before you are halfway through--and if you don't love the way it breaks and look forward to its being broken again (and it will be)--I will eat my copy. Though of course I'll have to run out right away and buy another one, because living without this book is no longer part of my plans." --Troy Jollimore "W. S. Di Piero gives off cascades of words that run like a warm engine, with all parts working together. There might be a mysterious noise or two along the way but don't worry, you'll be back on the road." --Ed Ruscha Praise for Di Piero: "His poems have the texture of American cities, the sights, sounds, and especially the smells of where we've lived in the last thirty years, and he has caught our American voices in all their glory and banality, our diction and our inflections, even when we're talking to ourselves. By some magic--let's call it inspiration--he knows us even when there's almost nothing to know." --Philip Levine, Ploughshares "R. P. Blackmur once said that great poetry 'adds to the stock of available reality,' and that's certainly true of W. S. Di Piero's work. He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He's a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves." --Christian Wiman, editor in chief of POETRY "Having mastered the art of weaving gold thread from straw, W. S. Di Piero in his new collection exults in such commonplace materials as 'the argument of an afternoon' or 'one street's undistinguished gift.' The poetry that results is calm, grave, firm, sensuous and as deeply refreshing as a cup of well water." --John Ashbery "With language that's as simple as it is musical, Di Piero sets dazzling moments amid plainsong." --The New York Times Book Review "W. S. Di Piero is a singular yet deceptive presence in American poetry. He fearlessly juxtaposes the Latinate and the Anglo-Saxon, the raunchy and the sacred, car horns and choir ... Di Piero's is a moral imagination without a trace of sententiousness." --Mark Rudman "W. S. Di Piero's poems insistently display the features of great art. The poems eschew solipsism, aggrandizement, and the consolation of fantasy, to grapple with the gritty reality of the twenty-first-century surround. Di Piero's milieu is firmly urban, and in this volume things are moving fast with an urgent, yearning-for-more impetus." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Di Piero searches for the words that will suffice, for the words that will ring as poetry and yet be wholly American, an idiom at once rich and rough-hewn, at once crafted and spontaneous." --Partisan Review "His poems are at once rich, serious, seething, and disturbing." --POETRY "Di Piero's poems are uncomfortably realistic. Many of them give the impression of some chunk of life that has been mercilessly broken off and refigured on the page. The pain it takes to do this--to suffer experience into form--is the filament that ignites Di Piero's temperament and which sizzles through everything that he writes." --Threepenny Review "Whether he's describing the vivid street characters from his childhood in South Philadelphia, the restorers in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, or the apricot trees in his backyard in San Francisco, Di Piero looks at the world with a painter's eye and a poet's sense of craft." --Harvard Review "This is a poetry of witness and invention, to be sure. Syntactic loops, music, nature, talkiness and wisdom or what passes for wisdom appear in almost every poem, making the collection rich with both music and delight." --The San Francisco Chronicle "Tombo is a nod to the sublime, an acknowledgment of how insignificant we can feel in the face of nature's grandeur, an admission that we are not that important in the scheme of things." --Poets at Work

Author Bio

W. S. Di Piero is the author of ten books of poetry. A contributor to New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and many other periodicals, he also writes a monthly column on visual arts for an independent newsweekly, the San Diego Reader. A well-known essayist on art, literature, culture, and personal experience, the latest of his five essay collections contains his recent art writings: When Can I See You Again Di Piero's autobiographical essays have appeared in Best American Essays, and he's an accomplished translator of Greek and Italian poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, he lives in San Francisco.