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| Famous Persons We Have Known |
| Richard Robbins |
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| Book of the Year Award 2000 Honorable Mention —ForeWord Magazine |
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Poetry
96 Pages, .................. ISBN: 0-910055-66-1
Paper: $13.95............... ISBN: 0-910055-65-3
Cloth: $23.95
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In this collection of poems by Minnesota writer Richard Robbins, we indeed meet the famous persons promised in the title: Lon Chaney, Jr. buying eggs and bananas at a Capistrano Beach supermarket; Elvis "slipping out/with raccoons and owls to buy pink/Cadillacs for anyone that moved him." Marshal Dillon, his head split by a surfing mishap; even Geronimo, galloping back toward nature, "ruined for love."
But this book is about more than famous people. From the char and kokanee-choked waters of Montana to an art gallery in Utah where the narrator doesn't meet a famous poet laureate, Robbins traces his own heritage and ours by connecting past and present, the dead and living. He does so with sly humor, a naturalist's precision, and a potent lyricism. The cumulative effect is that of a building rhythm that echoes our own trembling relationship to the land that somehow sustains-"because," as the narrator says in "Bread," the collection's final poem, "feeding/the hungry is what it's always all about."
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Richard Robbins was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Southern California and Montana . He studied as an undergraduate with Glover Davis and Carolyn Forché at San Diego State University , and as a graduate student with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Tess Gallagher at the University of Montana . His first collection, The Invisible Wedding, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1984 as part of its Breakthrough Series. His second book of poems, Famous Persons We Have Known, was published in 2000 by Eastern Washington University Press. Over the years, he’s been fortunate to receive various awards and fellowships, including those from The Loft Literary Center and the McKnight Foundation (1997 and 2000), The Minnesota State Arts Board (1999), The Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (1998), The National Endowment for the Arts (1992), and The Poetry Society of America (1988). In spring of 2006, he was awarded the Kay Sexton Award from the Minnesota Humanities Commission for fostering books, reading, and literary activity in Minnesota . He currently directs the creative writing program and Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University , Mankato .
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| Praise for Famous Persons We Have Known |
"This is a humorous, sly, savvy book that explodes our national obsession-these poems are rooted in the weird conglomeration of movies, pop culture, and nature, where we haunt the landscape like the ghosts of fame we imagine at every gas station, grocery store, suburban mall, waiting for mysterious encounters with ineffable-Elvis or God-something to transform us, infuse us with passion, lead us out of the darkness of ordinary life."
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—Jonis Agee.......... |
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| "Famous Persons We Have Known draws us to it with the deep resonance of a great river or lake, one which reflects our inner landscape. The poems are grounded in the geography of the American west -its seasons, its people, its destruction - and lifted by the music Robbins coaxes out of language. They reveal a sympathy with nature and a passion for humane awareness in a culture which often seems to tell us merely to consume and, "Be happy you know nothing." The collection's final lines, about loved ones we must mourn, also apply to these poems, perhaps to all poems good enough to move us profoundly: "They are feeding us, even as they leave./They are inside of us, kneeling and singing./ They break us and tear from within/as if we were bread. They help us/turn new into the life we didn't know was already here."
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—William Trowbridge.......... |
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| "This is the most colorful book of poems I've read in recent years. There is something fresh in almost every line, and when I came to the end of the last poem, I felt I'd been given a world." |
—Ted Kooser....... |
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