Presents a selection of poetry that explores the complex power of the sexual bond and its extraordinary ability to transcend all spiritual, emotional, and physical boundaries

The Red Leaves of Night

Literature & Fiction

St. John, David

Poetry

HarperFlamingo

Study for the World's Body showcases the work of one of America's most celebrated and groundbreaking poets. In this remarkable and powerful new collection, he has selected the most evocative and well-loved poems from his earlier books and combined them with dazzling new ones.In 1976, St. John made his poetic debut with the publication of Hush, a book that immediately established him as a writer of astonishing power and vision, and revealed the theme that has proven central to his writing throughout his career: desire. In Hush and the three collections that follow it, desire plays out its drama on the body. St. John explores both its physical, erotic manifestations and its spiritual ones with intellectual rigor and an emotional engagement that vibrates with intensity.In his latest poems, St. John has turned his attention more acutely to the moral dimension of desire, writing about the spiritual hardships of the mature soul - sin and alienation, and our true and sometimes thwarted hunger for genuine spiritual communion. These newer poems possess a dark, exciting quality that reflects St. John's aesthetic maturation and assuredness.In his tour de force title poem, with which he concludes the collection, St. John returns to the body once again, and, with the penetrating insight forged by experience and maturity, reexamines with astounding and visionary grace the devastating consequences of our deepest and most overwhelming desires.

Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems

Perennial

David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse.
The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John's poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope -- meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.
Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell's Life Studies and John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.

The Face: A Novella in Verse

United States

Harper

A haunting and inventive book length sequence of poems from the distinguished author of Study for the World's Body. The Face is both fiercely lyrical and intimately conversational. Coming to terms with the failure of a great lo

Harper-perennial

Possession and loss, rapture and despair: David St. John's narrator in this dazzling collection of poems remains unflinchingly aware that the trajectory between these two states is both brief and irresistible. Like modern Dante's Virgil, he guides us through a mosaic of experiences to depict the vast architecture of erotic desire and communion. The sexual bond, with its potential for the breakdown of all spiritual and physical boundaries between two formerly separate beings, becomes the site of almost unbearable psychological and erotic tension that runs throughout the collection. The Red Leaves of Nightfinds its breathtaking power in a recognition of the necessary impermanence of such communion, and gives voice to that most courageous of modern men--one who grasps the dangers of ecstasy yet cannot turn away.

Red Leaves of Night, The

HarpPeren

A remarkable collection representing early and recent poems by David St. John, the critically acclaimed author of Hush, The Shore, and No Heaven. 
GUITAR
I have always loved the word guitar. 
I have no memories of my father on the patio
At dusk, strumming a Spanish tune,
Or my mother draped in that fawn wicker chair
Polishing her flute;
I have no memories of your song, distant Sister
Heart, of those steel strings sliding
All night through the speaker of the car radio
Between Tucumcari and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Though I've never believed those stories
Of gypsy cascades, stolen hoses, castanets,
And stars, of Airstream trailers and good fortune.
Though I've never met Charlie Christian, though
I've danced the floors of cold longshoremen's halls,
Though I've waited with the overcoats at the rear
Of concerts for lute, mandolin, and two guitars –
More than the music I love scaling its woven
Stairways, more than the swirling chocolate of wood
I have always loved the word guitar.

Study for the World's Body

“David St. John's work has been distinguished from the start by its intimacy and subtlety, and by a disturbing force, the work of an urgent sensibility and a true ear.” —W. S. Merwin This long-awaited collection from David St. John is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. The beauty, music, and artistry of David St. John’s poetry have been long admired; now The Auroras reveals the extent and breadth of this masterful poetic achievement. Readers of Larry Levis, Dana Gioia, and Phillip Levine will be captivated by this searing, surprising, and sensual collection from one of the world’s greatest poets writing at the height of his talent and insight.

The Auroras: New Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

A haunting and intimately observed new collection from David St. John, a poet of soaring imagination and passionate candor 
In The Last Troubadour, David St. John has given us a collection of new and selected poems of astonishing beauty, precise and keenly observed but also touched with sensuality and deep feeling. Nothing is too small to escape notice (in “Guitar” St. John reflects on the beauty of that word) or too large to be explored-the suicide of a friend, the illness of a lover, or the texture of longing and desire. A sharp observer of landscapes within and without, St. John directs his empathetic gaze and vivid, inventive voice to investigating both the darkest and the most inspiring parts of being human, the small moments between friends and lovers as well as the groundswells that alter lives.
 At times lyrical, sometimes conversational, occasionally wry and playful, St. John’s poetry reveals an expansive vision animated by “intimacy and subtlety, and by a disturbing force, the work of an urgent sensibility and a true ear.” (W.S. Merwin) The beauty, music, and artistry of David St. John’s widely admired work is fully on display in this masterful collection.

The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

Ecco

LAST TROUBADOUR

EccoPress

Poems that tell of love, desire, parents, children, ecstasy, and death mark the debut of a powerful new American lyric voice

Hush

Houghton/Mifflin

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

Books by St. John, David

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

The Red Leaves of Night

Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems

The Face: A Novella in Verse

The Face: A Novella in Verse

Red Leaves of Night, The

Study for the World's Body

The Auroras: New Poems

The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

LAST TROUBADOUR

Hush