ESCHATON
by
MICHAEL HELLER
Talisman House, Publishers
ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-066-7, $14.95
Available from: SPD, Amazon.com, Greenfields
(www.gfibooks.com) and good bookstores.
Like the Renaissance and Neo-classical poets who
speculated on the Great Chain of Being and
microcosm-macrocosm relationships, Heller
communicates a vision of human life as related to
natural processes of great intricacy and
magnitude. He strains his mind and the reader to
find the relationships between our experience and
these processes in the material world, but the
sense of magnificence is worth the strain. Parnassus: Poetry in Review
He’s a somewhat latter-day Jewish Yeats, full of
terror and joy, trying to make some sense of the
chaotic destructiveness of the 20th century in
lyric poetry. It is a heroic if impossible task. The East Hampton Star
. . . a singular address to unknowingness. Confrontation
Mr. Heller’s book is intent on inquiry, full of
rumination...filled with illumination. His is a
questing intelligence, forever on the trail of
the epistemological, the 'flimsy beatitudes of
order’. The New York Times Book Review
Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic.
His most recent collection of poetry is Exigent
Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003). He is the
author of two autobiographical works, Earth and
Cave (2007) and Living Root: A Memoir
(2001), and his critical books include Speaking
the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen
(2008), Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets,
Poetry and Poetics (2006), and his prize-winning
book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction's Net
of Branches (1985). His collection of short
fiction, Two Novellas, will be published in 2009.
Eschaton (new poems) Talisman House Publishers
(2009) available at SPD, Greenfield Distribution
(www.gfibooks.com), www. amazon.com and good
bookstores. Speaking The Estranged: Essays on the
Work of George Oppen (2008); Uncertain Poetries:
Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (2005) and
Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003)
available at www.saltpublishing.com, amazon.com
and good bookstores. Survey of work at
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/heller.htm
Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman
Johnson at
http://www.efjcomposer.com/EFJ/Collaborations.html
Recordings at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.html
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