Bøger af August Kleinzahler

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet captures the essence of the West's greatest music in verse, from Whitney Houston to Mahler"--

August Kleinzahler's new poems stretch and go places he has never gone before: They have his signature high color and rhythmic jump, but they take on a breadth of voice and achieve registers that his earlier work only hinted at. Ranging from Las Vegas and Mayfair to contemporary Berlin, these poems touch down at will in tableaux where Liberace unceremoniously meets with St. Kevin and Gustav Mahler with Ava Gardner. This is the strongest collection to date from a poet "equally at home anywhere between the jets and the steppes" (Alexsandar Hemon, Poetry).

The early poems of an American master"I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquoron summer eveningsbetter than the Marin hills at dusklavender and goldstretching miles to the sea.At the junction, up from the synagoguea weeknight, necessarilyand with my father--a sale on German beer.Air full of living dust:bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crustwounded crystalsappearing, disappearingamong streetlights and unsuccessful neon."--"Poetics"August Kleinzahler's first collections won him a cult following but have long been out of print and hard to find. Here Kleinzahler--acclaimed by The Times (London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"--has selected the best of the poems collected in Storm over Hackensack (1985) and Earthquake Weather (1989) and added an autobiographical Preface.

1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.In this powerful and inventive collection, August Kleinzahler succeeds in creating a new idiom for American lyric poetry that captures the velocity and swerves of contemporary life in the city. He pushes the language very hard to get there, and the results are breathtaking: an angular, propulsive poetry that transforms character, voice, and setting into buzzing, luminous events.

This is a book of jazzy, edgy, adventuresome poems from the author of Earthquake Weather and Like Cities, Like Storms. Ever aware, ever vivid, ever focused, Kleinzahler's are some of the finest lyrics being produced in American poetry today. "Pieces of ordinary talk are Kleinzahler's strong suit," as Helen Vendler observed in Parnassus, "because they occur in his glancing, alert rhythms. . . . [His] jaunty skips and riffs solace the ear." Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow presents an experimental poetry of exceptional wit and control.

August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise poems that are grounded in the people, places and language among which he has lived. Snow Approaching On The Hudson is a collection of poetry that moves back and forth across the country and abroad, and through the realm of dreams, past and present, and inner and outer landscapes. The haunting, shifting atmosphere Kleinzahler creates is peopled by characters intimate, historical, and imaginary.Kleinzahler's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always-masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.

Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, colliding and intersecting and spilling over into each other. Whether the voice embodied is that of 'an adult male of late middle age, about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma' as in 'Whitney Houston' or that of the title character in 'Hootie Bill Do Polonius' who is bidding 'adios compadre. To a most galuptious scene Kid', Kleinzahler locates and exhibits in his poetry the human heart at the core of lived experience. This is a poet searching for - and finding - a cadence capable of describing life as it is lived today. Kleinzahler's poetry is, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep), 'ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.' The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the 'moments of grace' buried amongst the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

A collection of August Kleinzahler's best poems, divided - like his life - between New Jersey and San Francisco.

Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.