The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume One, 1963-1967

Literature & Fiction

Louis Daniel Brodsky

Poetry

Time Being Books

The second volume in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Complete Poems series, covering his early years as a professional poet, from 1967 to 1976, contains more than eight hundred chronologically arranged pieces. This body of work shows Brodsky developing a number of artistic strategies to record the life he chose outside the realm of academia, which he abandoned after completing his master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1968.  In an extraordinary inward-looking search for that which would fulfill his need to be an artist and a working man, to lead a life both creative and practical, Brodsky moved to a town of ten thousand in southeast Missouri, to work in a men's-clothing factory. In this milieu, so foreign to him, he composed verse only sporadically for two and a half years. But once at home in his new surroundings, he began producing poems at a prolific rate -- about small-town life, marriage, factory work, days and nights on the road as an outlet-store manager, the birth of his first child, parenthood.  These experiences revitalized Brodsky's enthusiasm for his true calling -- capturing in verse the things of this world. His sense of wonder in meeting townspeople and blue-collar laborers, engaging in café society, rural politics, and commerce, gave rise to works he never would have written as an English teacher. To his astonishment, Brodsky discovered that poetry could be wrought out of the most seemingly prosaic elements. And this revelation led him to yet another: that nothing, no matter how imagined or autobiographically revealing, disturbing, or mundane, can be left out if the poet's goal is to get it said honestly, contain his entire life in the lines of one ongoing poem.

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Two, 1967-1976

Winner of the 2004 Best Book of Poetry Award from the Center for Great Lakes Culture at Michigan State University  Recapturing the freshness of youthful summers in Wisconsin, at Camp Nebagamon for Boys, the poet writes with gentle tenderness of a father's love of his son, of the strength of friendship, and of the resonance of memory and time.

You Can't Go Back, Exactly: Revised, expanded edition

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Three, 1976-1980

The third volume of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky presents over seven hundred poems, written from July 1976 through December 1980. By this period in his life, Brodsky had a wife and two children, a thriving business that kept him traveling, and a passion for acquiring Faulkneriana, sparked by his deep appreciation of the author's literature, that had led him on increasingly frequent journeys to Oxford, Mississippi, and elsewhere, to meet those who knew Faulkner and those who might supplement Brodsky's expanding collection.  Spending considerably more time away from home than ever before, he began to compose most of his poems while driving, eating in small-town caf , staying in motels, and retreating to bars after twelve-hour workdays, always filling his omnipresent notebook with new images and metaphors. It was during these trips that Brodsky conceived many of his poetic personae: Willy Sypher, the Jewish ragman road peddler; a man who, though he lost no family in it, still feels he's a victim of the Holocaust; the Northern outlander, who appears in many of his "Southern" poems; the nature poet, who captures the beauty of rural America, and the cynical city poet, who observes its bigotry and vulgarity; and the unhappy family man, who feels he must escape home, for the freedom of the open road, but nevertheless suffers guilt and remorse.  The poems from this segment of Brodsky's literary career reflect a man, in his mid and late thirties, facing growing desperation as he attempts to fulfill the complex responsibilities of his day-to-day commitments and yet address an unrelenting compulsion to record his frenetic life, in verse.

Sheri L. Vandermolen

Peddler on the Road: Days in the Life of Willy Sypher

In Peddler on the Road: Days in the Life of Willy Sypher, Louis Daniel Brodsky sets forth a series of poetic vignettes about one Jewish traveling salesman's journeys as a representative for a major Midwest manufacturer of men's dress clothing, depicting the odyssey of a fifty-year career devoted to the road and to the small towns that define it. This novel, in fifty-two poems, is told both by an omniscient narrator and by Willy Sypher himself. We follow Willy's progress, from the time he joins Acme-Zenith Clothing, of St. Louis, in 1938, to his languishment in a nursing home, at century's end. In five chapters, each covering about a decade and a half, we see Willy advance into his prime, in the forties, fifties, and sixties full of "pep," tackling seven states, in two sales territories, and believing himself to be unstoppable and then suffer the inexorable loss of his energy, the shrinking of his client base, and the ultimate inertia of old age. This is not one man's story of achieving the American Dream, nor is it about his succumbing to the disillusionment of eking out a living; rather, it is the tale of a dogged, proud individual determined to stay even, survive, day to month to year, against fierce competition not only from others in his trade, not only from the rigors of road travel itself, but, perhaps most significant, from the forces of prejudice and intolerance. Reading Peddler on the Road, you will meet a genuine American hero, the unsung kind that, though all but faded into myth, once invigorated the national landscape with optimism and faith in the worth of the common man.

<p>With A Mississippi Trilogy, Brodsky brings together his three previous books that capture a "Northern outlander"'s forays into the Deep South. In Book One, Mississippi Vistas, the outlander passionately explores Mississippi's William Faulkner country, encountering the ghosts of Faulkner's characters and struggling with his own desires and failures. In Book Two, Disappearing in Mississippi Latitudes, he attempts to come to terms with the lingering vestiges of the Old South's gentility and its tenacious racism and poverty. In Book Three, Mistress Mississippi, the outlander realizes he can't escape his self-destructive ways or the lure of Mississippi, which he metaphorically transforms into his "Mistress Mississippi." Praised by such literary Malcolm Cowley and Robert Penn Warren, A Mississippi Trilogy stands as one of Brodsky's true masterpieces.</p>

A Mississippi Trilogy: A Poetic Saga of the Modern South

This newest book of poetry by Louis Daniel Brodsky, ,i>The Words of My Mouth and the Meditations of My Heart, was written in the aftermath of the discovery of his brain cancer and a complicated operation and chemotherapy. During his long period of convalescence and treatment, the poet transforms his pain and struggle into a sequence of poetic meditations and prayers that can inspire and enrich the reader.

The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart

In this daring book of twenty-three poems, Brodsky dramatically juxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects, in two sections ("Peddler on the Road" and "The Ashkeeper's Everlasting Passion Week"). The contrast is stark and unnerving, but Brodsky manages to blend the workaday experiences and reflections of an American Jewish traveling salesman, Willy Sypher, with gruesome and poignant glimpses of the Holocaust, as seen through the eyes of shattered survivors. This volume leaves the reader feeling the weight that Jewishness imposes upon those who must endure anti-Semitism.

The Thorough Earth

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

Books by Louis Daniel Brodsky

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

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume One, 1963-1967

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Two, 1967-1976

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Two, 1967-1976

You Can't Go Back, Exactly: Revised, expanded edition

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Three, 1976-1980

The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky: Volume Three, 1976-1980

Peddler on the Road: Days in the Life of Willy Sypher

A Mississippi Trilogy: A Poetic Saga of the Modern South

The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart

The Thorough Earth