Bøger af Mark Cox

Mark Cox pulls no punches in these candid poems about family, relationships, loss, regret, growing older and our human condition, generally. "Looking back for a low point marking the worst of my insobriety, it might be that signal moment I put out my cigarette in the holy water font of St. Paul's Catholic church, right in front of the priest, I might add. . . " Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, always honest and thought provoking, this is the seventh volume of poetry from a lauded veteran poet who has been publishing prominently for almost forty years.

In this collection, poems selected from a distinguished thirty-year career converse with each other across books and across time. Soulful, artful and yet accessible, these poems explore essential connections--one's relationship to poetic tradition, the reader, the natural world, other lives, language itself. Cox renews strategies that have served poets across centuries and international borders: voice, rhythm, image, vision, myth, humor, shrewd architectonics whether "free" or not, a willingness to bring the reader decisively into the transaction. The poems often generate dense, shifting constellations of metaphor, and Cox's voice carries a dreamlike power, yet he stays close to daily existence, mines it, giving especially clairvoyant attention to the difficult, beautiful life of families and the challenges of our mortality. In doing so, he reminds us of what's important, of the emotional and psychological inscapes that sustain us.

Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems probe the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape - the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straightforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility.

Behind surfaces that can sometimes be wryly comic, Mark Cox is unafraid to risk adult tenderness ("brutal tenderness" he says in one poem) and great empathy for this world's sufferers. Which is to say that beneath a rich variety of occasions (from an ancient Egyptian mummifier doing up a fifteen-foot crocodile, to a current-day housewife doing up an angel food cake), Cox's bedrock concern is that impossible thing of endless grief and joy that we call the human condition. These poetic meditations and monologues are some of the least prosaic prose you'll ever read. -Albert Goldbarth

In Natural Causes, a collection haunted by death, compassion, and love, the penchants for metaphor and resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox's earlier work remain as vibrant as ever.