| |
| The Cartographer's Melancholy |
| David Axelrod |
 |
| |
Poetry
68 Pages
ISBN: 1-59766-011-6
Paper: $14.00
|
|
Fate, stillness, travel, will and the deep bruise of individual history becoming political history all shape this new book from David Axelrod. In a language extraordinarily lean and fresh, Axelrod shows what it would be like to be truly alive to the nuance of events, structures, and the declarations of those who are in or out of power. This is an unusual and moving book.
|
| David Axelrod is an Ohio native who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His essays and poems have appeared in many publications including Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, and From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry. His most recent book is Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West, a collection of essays published in 2004. Axelrod is a professor of English at Eastern Oregon University and lives in La Grande, Oregon |
| |
| Praise for The Cartographer's Melancholy |
"Like exposures at an archeological dig, 'holy site piled upon / wreckage of holy site,' history presents us simultaneously with both the miraculous and the annihilated. Like other 21st-century witnesses, we suffer the cartographer's melancholy, 'phantom capitals open on his lap,' having been permitted his ability 'to live /multiple lives in concurrent times'; but unable to change anything for the better. Many poets would leave us here, defined by our ethical absence, our greatest failures. Instead, Axelrod points us toward the power of individual gesture: of walking in old forest, of giving and receiving, of gathering together. Fearless, guided by the angel Whitman, his poems enter the dark soul of American Empire and come back speaking."
|
—Richard Robbins.......... |
| |
"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? Keats asked in a letter to his family. David Axelrod in The Cartographer's Melancholy maps that pilgrimage. He follows the refugee road with its transcendence, resignation, and dark dramatic historics, and within each poem he makes the important discoveries, the ones that couterpoise suffering against the world's beauty."
|
—Sandra Alcosser......... |
| |
| The Cartographer's Melancholy is a Lynx House Book by Eastern Washington University Press. |
| |
|
| << Back to Poetry |
| << Back to EWU Press Home |
| |
