Other People (Phoenix Poets)

ISBN: 0226092747

Author: Campion, Peter

Condition: New

Product Description Poem to FireFast transparency that explodes the fuel and airin the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrustsdown on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spinsyou cut through all material that blocks your wayso fast that driving now past rushes and billboardsthis pull to her could be your own impersonal presencecloaked in the day to day of the malls and condosall those wired sensors keeping on guard for youexcept you flicker even inside the wet wallwhere papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsationin whatever room she's moving through this momentunder the cotton and the cool smoothness tinted blueIn this debut collection, Peter Campion explores both the gaps and the connections between the self and others. Like the "night blooming jasmine leaving its warm trace," these poems arise out of the dark. A man awakens in a hotel room to find the neighboring voices merging with the anguished souls of his nightmare. A woman living alone beside the ocean hears the words of the dead echo in the crashing waves. But if these poems convey a feeling of an enduring emptiness, they also offer us the most vital intimacies. In one poem, two lovers traverse the industrial sweep of strip malls and office towers to arrive at their rendezvous. In another, the seemingly simple memory of a mother playing with her sons at a park bridges a chasm of pain and loss. With great poise, keen insight, and formal skill, Campion moves between shared experience and interior life in the shifting textures of Other People. Whether writing in rhymed couplets or free verse, he matches a deep understanding of the poetic tradition with his own imaginative feel for structure. "The 'other people' of the title of this extraordinary book are fully alive in the life of its language; and so is the poet observing them, and observing himself, as one of them. The book is a sympathetic and unsentimental instrument of truth."-David Ferry About the Author Peter Campion is the author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry and of four collections of poems, Other People, The Lions, El Dorado, and One Summer Evening at the Falls. His poems have appeared in publications including Poetry, Slate, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and New Republic, among others. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, he teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Minnesota. More information and events at www.petercampion.net.