Meditations on Rising and Falling: Meditations on Rising and Falling

by Philip Pardi

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Cloth: 978-0-299-22730-2 | Paper: 978-0-299-22734-0 | eISBN: 978-0-299-22733-3
Library of Congress Classification PS3616.A735M43 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 2008 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by David St. John

From tumult to catharsis, the poems in Philip Pardi’s first collection, Meditations on Rising and Falling, explore the emotional tug-of-war that is the human experience. Present at every turn are people searching for meaning and sense in an elusive world: a doorman who plans to punch the senator who never speaks to him, a son who discusses ornithology with his father’s dying friend, a roofer who copes with his past as he senses his imminent fall to the ground. While the poems are witness to the turmoil of both body and soul, they are not without hope. Pardi finds grace in noise, and happiness in the mourning doves, showing us that often, the reasons for disbelief become precisely the reasons for belief. Pardi’s collection is a testimony to faith and resistance in a world where “falling is the given.”

Winner, Award for Poetry and Literary Criticism, The Writers’ League of Texas

Finalist, 2008 Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Philip Pardi has published poems in Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been reprinted in Best New Poets 2006 and Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas. A former Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, he now lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York and teaches at Bard College.

REVIEWS

“A truly exceptional volume of poems. Wry, wise, and powerful, this work offers highly nuanced sketches and shrewdly observed scenes of profound human reckoning. With a child’s awe and an adult’s caution—and compassionate care—the speaker in these calm and elegantly philosophical poems wins our trust time and time again. The measured, lyric ease of these poems is matched only by their superb tonal complexity and masterful, celebratory ease.”—David St. John, Brittingham Prize Judge

“While Philip Pardi’s poems are lithe and imaginative, the real pleasure here is his willingness to dwell on an idea or feeling, to examine the familiar in a manner that is both gentle and startling.”—Bob Hicok, author of Animal Soul and The Legend of Light

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments	000
I.
Here	000
Drinking with My Father in London	000
Leaving Angelo	000
The Roofers	000
After Peach Season	000
Sonata	000
Two Hands	000
Poem Without Birds	000
II.
God's Shins	000
III.
Angels with Headaches	000
Three Meditations	000
Seven Parables of the Return	000
Under Hemlocks	000
Just Outside Utopia, Texas	000
Bracing Myself to Hear the Day's News	000
Call and Response	000
IV.
Seventeen Wings	000
Notes	000

EXCERPT
“Tonight, the uneven darkness is equal parts bold and apologetic. It’s the shabby moonlight epiphanies are made for, but I’m not due for an epiphany. I’m due for something lower in my body, something akin to the warming of hands by a mug of something hot.” —excerpt from “God’s Shins” Copyright The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All Rights Reserved.

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