New from Junction Press:
Complete Poems of Richard Elman 1955 - 1997
Publication: March 2017
530 pages
$29
ISBN: 978-1-881523-23-9
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Though best known for his fifteen novels and short story collections and his five volumes of non-fiction, Richard Elman (1934-1997) also left us four poetry collections, as well as hundreds of previously uncollected poems, many of which have never appeared in print before. All have been gathered into the current volume by his widow Alice Elman, a lifetime of poetry by a poet who deserves to be far better known.
Richard Elman was an authentic man of letters and of conscience. Writing was his life, writing as an act of personal testimony and witness. At whatever cost he spoke truth to power and however painful, he spoke truth to himself. At his best, he wrote as though there were a direct line from his heart to his hand.
While he published highly-praised novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, criticism, social commentary, poetry was for Richard his first love, his daily bread, and his life line. [His poems are] astonishing in
[their] immediacy, an urgent communiqué from the front lines of consciousness […]. The poems, like most of Richard Elman’s poetry, are “occasional,” in the sense that they rose from the moment of their
conception. At their best they capture that moment in all its immediacy and, at times, transcend it.
from L. S. Asekoff’s “Foreword”
The poems have the clarity of Larkin or Heaney and the verve of a great New York School poet like Frank O’Hara. At a time when too much poetry concerns itself with abstraction, this insightful, heart-rending poet tackles the broadest range of human experience—love and sex and grief, doubt and terror and joy. Elman doesn’t flinch
from the hard truths, and the reader is richer for having his words.
Mary Karr
[Richard’s] voice [...] is instantly recognizable for its authenticity. All his senses were amazingly alert and he confronted an often difficult and incoherent world with a spiritual equipoise and an impressive capacity for innocent joy.
David R. Slavitt
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