A New & Selected Collection from awardwinning poet Robert Bensen The poems in WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE, new and culled from six collections, take place in the U.S., Caribbean, Indigenous Americas, Europe, and Arabia. Around the globe, lightning strikes 44 times each second. With luck, a poet gets hit six or seven times in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, Randall Jarrell said. For Robert Bensen, once was a calling: "...when lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming, / its rivers and rivulets flooded me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways." Shakespeare said lightning "unfolds both heaven and Earth." Similarly, these poems manifest spirit in the world: in the child's devotion to dance ("Two Dancers"), the privations of Alzheimer's ("Quick Bright Things"), or a celebratory 50th-anniversary slog ("Rainforest"). They reveal forces deadly and vital: courage after injury ("Sonata for the Left Hand," "1959"), fear following a terror attack ("At a Solemn Wind Ensemble"), greed for gold ("Orenoque"). In sundry guises--a 12thCentury Japanese princess, a girl in Trinidad, Eurydice, and others--the voices in these poems deal with gender, racism, genocide, teenage hormones, rabies vaccine, eaglewatching, home repair, and worse. Between the mundane and sublime, Robert Bensen's lines illuminate with the force of revelation. "Robert Bensen's poems reach wide and drive deep and ride on the strong motion of their making. Bensen can map the moment tellingly, but there is always a backdrop of historical awareness that grounds the lines. He knows, literally and figuratively, the 'lay of the land.'"--Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age "Robert Bensen's poems are filled with humor and wisdom, piercing imagery, and a vast range of striking stories. Central to all of this: the music! Vivaldi, Mozart, Meringue, a croak in a frog's throat, and Bensen's sensitive translations of Baudelaire, Degas, and Nizar Qabbani. Without a doubt, WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE is an electric book. It forks lightning." --Roger W. Hecht, author of Talking Pictures "WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE documents a life devoted to poetry as a humane vocation seeking transcendence in a world of difficulty. Robert Bensen's sympathetic lens focuses on loved ones, aging friends, dancers, indigenous people, and questers historical and contemporary. The jawdropping range of his new poems embraces, among others, immigrant ancestors, a grade school fire drill, a wedding anniversary in a rainforest, a house consciously resisting needed repairs, and a Shostakovich quartet as a warning of world disaster. Bensen's expansive and capacious language celebrates this variety and illuminates it lovingly." -- Jay Rogoff, author of Loving in Truth: New & Selected Poems "The poems in WHAT LIGHTNING SPOKE involve unforeseen but extremelywell controlled shifts in diction, tone, and narrative--and before you know it, the poem is headed in a fresh direction that you eagerly follow. His voice is conversational, but capable of a haunting mystery, humor or poignance. This is a fabulous collection by an extremely talented poet."--Thomas Travisano, author of Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop Poetry.

What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems by Robert Bensen

Literature & Fiction

Bensen, Robert

Poetry

Bright Hill Press

Poetry. Native American Studies. The title poems of Robert Bensen's ORENOQUE, WETUMKA anchor a collection of narrative and lyric poems that traverse the borderlands between Indigenous and European America, and bear witness to the disruptions and continuities of their cultures. To summon or access these others, the poetic voice takes as permeable the boundary between this world and the unseen--between now and then, between here and there. "Orenoque" is set along the Orinoco River of Venezuela during the rapacious explorations for the golden kingdom, El Dorado, in the 1500s, and in the late 1990s during the author's visit with a class of students exploring the exotic Orinoco for remnants of that ancient world. The poem presents Native creation stories and European myths about lands beyond the Western Sea, which inform the story of a Warao man coming of age as his village is massacred by Lope de Aguirre's expedition. "Wetumka" weaves an old migration story from Zuni with the story of a modern Cherokee artist's effort to heal family ruptures traceable to the Trail of Tears. "Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival," "The Given," and other poems refocus these historical themes on the author's own family and their adoption of a child of Native ancestry. "Robert Bensen's poems commune with the nature of voice, identity, and memory, in a complex and ambitious array of expression. They arc from ancient Egypt to the musings of Sir Walter Ralegh, spiral into the nuances of enrollment in one Cherokee family, eventually coming down the glide path of the poet's own personal experiences, all filters off. This collection demands that the reader carefully consider both the ways we construct our understanding of the world and people around us, and the responsibility of choosing to speak. It rewards those up to the task, and asks others to consider why they are not prepared for that engagement."--Eric Gansworth

Orenoque, Wetumka, & Other Poems

“Before brims with the ordinary lives of neighbors and family, where little girls die suddenly of meningitis, people are mistreated or loved, and men in their garages never finish repairing their motorcycles or their wives’ pie plates. Life, the book reminds us, is tragic, life is funny, and art shows us these wholes. The language is all ruckus and grace and humanity, and the words won’t go away.”Carol Frost“Robert Bensen is a poet of the highest ambition, who accepts tremendous challenges and acquits himself skillfully. His book is a generous feast for the imagination.”X. J. Kennedy, Robert Frost Medal, Jackson Poetry Prize“Here is a beautiful wide-ranging collection of poems by one of the best poets now writing in these United States. There are exquisite lyrics, explosive political poems, explorations of little-known historic places, people, events. This is a major collection of poems: it will delight, astonish, and educate those who are lucky enough to find and enjoy it for themselves.”Carter Revard, An Eagle Nation and Family Matters/Tribal Affairs“Robert Bensen is a poet of great—and ever more necessary—balance. He opens the register wide, writing with honesty, insight, and a superb ear. Reading his poems, we feel the bubble in the level go right to dead center.” Sven Birkerts, The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry“A tuned, well-tempered distemper springs from these poems. Robert Bensen grasps our mortal coil, that hot-white internal wrestling, with exacting force and grace.”Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons“Here is lyric poetry of a high order, of kinetic energy, of springyEnglish, elegiac, celebratory, polished, technically highly-skilled.” DAVID GREYSMITH, author of Rhyme Gist

Before

United States

Formal Feeling Publishing

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Books by Bensen, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bensen, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems by Robert Bensen

Orenoque, Wetumka, & Other Poems

Before