A fourth anthology of poetry by the critically acclaimed author of The Engrafted Word offers the poet's reflections on the impact of the past on the present in works that combine elements of social satire and personal observation with emotional power.

At the Palace of Jove: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Kirchwey, Karl

Poetry

Marian Wood Books/Putnam

A fourth anthology of poetry by the critically acclaimed author of The Engrafted Word offers the poet's reflections on the impact of the past on the present in works that combine elements of social satire and personal observation with emotional power. Simultaneous.

At the Palace of Jove PA: Poems

Putnam Adult

It is this "shockability" that informs Karl Kirchwey's new work. Through four collections, he has explored the resonances between past and present, seeking a sense of home in a world of losses. Now, as the horrors of the modern world crowd in on him, he meditates on the future his children will inherit. These are angry poems, tender poems, poems of hope, love, and despair. Reviewing Kirchwey's last book in The New Criterion, William Logan wrote: "An elegy for an uncle, a World War II pilot killed in the Pacific, reminds us that we live only by the sacrifice of the dead, and therefore in their shadows. Shadows fall frequently over these poems, from lives corrupted, crippled, or destroyed," and in the concluding section of this new work, a prose memoir with poems that will appear in full in Parnassus, the poet revisits that dead uncle and the unhappy generations preceding his own. Seeking out family origins and family secrets, this section climaxes in a holy Hindu pilgrimage in honor of the dead and returns the poet, who in his search has circled the globe, to the family of the living and the circumscribed happiness of this world.

The Happiness of this World

"Kirchwey shares the classicist's vision of poetry as a living tradition that extends from antiquity to the present . . . and his poems in this issue are about violent love and transcendent longing, the great romantic themes." -Langdon Hammer, The American Scholar "One of the very best poets of his generation." -John Hollander "The poems shimmer with intelligence, wit, and delicacy; and yet at times they resonate with the deepest and most stirring of feelings." -Anthony Hecht Mount Lebanon is a singular work from a mature talent. Loosely structured around an extinct Shaker community in New York state and the surrounding landscape, the book expands to include Kirchwey's stories of aging, parenthood, romantic love, and even the domestic pleasures and dramas hidden within a garden. Each poem is beautifully crafted; taken together, they make up a powerful volume. This is a witty, stylish, and moving collection from a major American poet.

Mount Lebanon

Marian Wood

A survivor of the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., an old man in his garden in upstate New York, a fourteenth-century Picard glazier, a modern city-dweller repainting his front hall--the speakers in these richly textured poems reflect on the culture of their own time and contemplate the enigma of home. Here Karl Kirchwey provides the reader with a synchronous vision of the ancient and the contemporary while illustrating the paradox of geographical fixity in a world of change. The poems use the formal resources of the modern syllabic and the classic hexameter, of free verse as well as the stanza forms of Herbert and Wordsworth. Their settings encompass French and Italian Switzerland, Sicily, Greece, rural New England, Manhattan, and London. Together the poems form an atlas of significant emotional range and terrestrial color.For Allo (Sculpture from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, now in the British Museum)It is as if the wind had flayed her woolen chiton from her, yet somehow she is clothed: neither in flesh nor stone. Has she been stripped by time, then, or the fury of her own movement? It starts up by her throat: a Y of sinuous folds descends between her breasts; then, magnified as roses are in fabric in a light summer dress, so that the lower blossoms are actually larger than those above, or as waves find their murderous amplitude through long movement at sea alone, or thought does, these too counter their direction, involving the whole body in their torque of contrary motion, so that the hem tosses in restless troughs, a single flange of vengeance floating in the way the mind does, and condemns itself in solitude.

A Wandering Island

Princeton University Press

The Engrafted Word: Poems

Henry Holt and Co.

The graftings of flesh upon flesh, of history upon time and memory, of the New World on the Old, of language upon silence, of faith upon doubt: these are the graftings that form this third book of poems by Guggenhein Fellow and Rome Prize winner Karl Kirchwey. Whether he is writing of the intimate moment or the painfully personal, he reaches across time to link us to our past and to the larger universe of humankind. Kirchwey graces us with poetics of a high order even as he weaves the threads that tie this collection into a stunningly integrated whole. These are indeed poems that reward rereading.

Holt Paperbacks

Through six earlier books Karl Kirchwey has rewarded readers with poems of great musicality, visual richness, and historical resonance. Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems represents a culmination of his “formal mastery”—an honor often too loosely bestowed in contemporary American poetry, but one Kirchwey thoroughly earns. As in his 1998 New York Times Notable Book The Engrafted Word, the city of Rome becomes a lens through which to understand the contemporary human experience and the upheavals of human loss. Stumbling Blocks takes as its starting point the shattered ancient Roman ruins described in Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay's celebrated sonnet—a landscape of death feeding upon itself and restored to life in the imagination of each successive generation to salvage its own narratives. Kirchwey builds new arches and mythological intersections in exquisite poems that take long walks in the Eternal City, through landscapes far away and deep within. This gorgeous collection takes us back in time and brings us forward through our Old and New Worlds, revealing through the religion of art both beauty and atrocity.

Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems

TriQuarterly

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Books by Kirchwey, Karl

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

At the Palace of Jove: Poems

At the Palace of Jove PA: Poems

The Happiness of this World

Mount Lebanon

A Wandering Island

The Engrafted Word: Poems

The Engrafted Word: Poems

Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems