University of Wisconsin Press, 2015 Paper: 978-0-299-30334-1 | eISBN: 978-0-299-30333-4 Library of Congress Classification PS3556.E458A6 2015 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
“Drop the personal,” Alan Feldman’s best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago’s interpretations of the afterlife: “Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.”
In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman’s poems in his first segment, “Self-Portraits,” are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment “Partners” reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an “uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain.” In the section “Offshore” Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his impractical love of sailing, and his wonder at Walter Cronkite’s obtuseness about Vietnam. In his final segment, “What Now?,” he asks about meaning itself. Babysitting his tiny granddaughter, he thinks of sailing—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror—and wonders if even this suggests something world-encompassing he’s “still hoping to find a name for. / If it isn’t joy.”
Winner of the Mass Book Award for Poetry, Massachusetts Center for the Book
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Alan Feldman is a professor emeritus of English at Framingham State University and previously taught creative writing at Harvard University. He is the author of many collections of poetry, including A Sail to Great Island, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Frank O’Hara, and Lucy Mastermind. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts.
REVIEWS
“Alan Feldman is our greatest American poet of the household and family, as a loving, growing, struggling, and essential institution. He manifests the kind of love we rarely see in our poetry, and this familial love pours into the world around him. I am personally thankful every time I read an Alan Feldman poem, and Immortality, the book you are holding in your hands right now, makes us understand that immortality lies all about us, in everything we experience as a human being.”—Bill Zavatsky, author of Where X Marks the Spot
“A richly engaged, near flawless collection. Like those magic mineral waters pumped from deep in the earth, Feldman’s poems can cure emotional arthritis and ventilate the soul. Better poems than these cannot be written in this confiding, intelligent humanist mode.”—Tony Hoagland, author of Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Sweet Ruin
“These poems enact with grace and intelligence the process by which one comes to possess the life one is actually living. This is an enlarging journey that no reader of poetry will want to miss, offering the pleasures of discovery every step of the way.”—Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Practical Gods
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
I. Self Portraits
Just Once
Two Walks
The Coyote
At the Dentist
Pathetic, Those Chickadees
Sincerity and Authenticity
The Terrible Memory
Hate
A Little Ode to Television
How Big?
The News
A Message from My Mother
II. Partners
“The River Merchant’s Wife”
To Vocabulary
A Walk to the Spring
Uncontested
Quintet
Oxytocin
Married to Me
The Tiny Couple
Ashore in Oak Bluffs
The Afterlife
III. Offshore
Imagining Uruguay
Flight from Cyprus
Reading Taha by Lamplight
Oaxaca
The Blessing of the Poodles
House of Refuge
What the Pig Meant
Walter at the Wheel
Watch Battery
Lunch at the Brew Moon
In Response to My Fear That I’ll Receive
Another Cal from the Yacht Salesman
IV. What Now?
My Happiness
Landlocked
The Blue Boat
When My Book Group Reconvened after
So Many Years
In November
The Reason for the Child
The Bad Singers of San Miguel de Allende
The Rowboat, The Girl, The Light
Love Poem
Fame
To Teaching
How to Improvise
A Summer Afternoon
The Light
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015 Paper: 978-0-299-30334-1 eISBN: 978-0-299-30333-4
“Drop the personal,” Alan Feldman’s best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago’s interpretations of the afterlife: “Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.”
In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman’s poems in his first segment, “Self-Portraits,” are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment “Partners” reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an “uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain.” In the section “Offshore” Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his impractical love of sailing, and his wonder at Walter Cronkite’s obtuseness about Vietnam. In his final segment, “What Now?,” he asks about meaning itself. Babysitting his tiny granddaughter, he thinks of sailing—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror—and wonders if even this suggests something world-encompassing he’s “still hoping to find a name for. / If it isn’t joy.”
Winner of the Mass Book Award for Poetry, Massachusetts Center for the Book
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Alan Feldman is a professor emeritus of English at Framingham State University and previously taught creative writing at Harvard University. He is the author of many collections of poetry, including A Sail to Great Island, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Frank O’Hara, and Lucy Mastermind. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts.
REVIEWS
“Alan Feldman is our greatest American poet of the household and family, as a loving, growing, struggling, and essential institution. He manifests the kind of love we rarely see in our poetry, and this familial love pours into the world around him. I am personally thankful every time I read an Alan Feldman poem, and Immortality, the book you are holding in your hands right now, makes us understand that immortality lies all about us, in everything we experience as a human being.”—Bill Zavatsky, author of Where X Marks the Spot
“A richly engaged, near flawless collection. Like those magic mineral waters pumped from deep in the earth, Feldman’s poems can cure emotional arthritis and ventilate the soul. Better poems than these cannot be written in this confiding, intelligent humanist mode.”—Tony Hoagland, author of Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Sweet Ruin
“These poems enact with grace and intelligence the process by which one comes to possess the life one is actually living. This is an enlarging journey that no reader of poetry will want to miss, offering the pleasures of discovery every step of the way.”—Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Practical Gods
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
I. Self Portraits
Just Once
Two Walks
The Coyote
At the Dentist
Pathetic, Those Chickadees
Sincerity and Authenticity
The Terrible Memory
Hate
A Little Ode to Television
How Big?
The News
A Message from My Mother
II. Partners
“The River Merchant’s Wife”
To Vocabulary
A Walk to the Spring
Uncontested
Quintet
Oxytocin
Married to Me
The Tiny Couple
Ashore in Oak Bluffs
The Afterlife
III. Offshore
Imagining Uruguay
Flight from Cyprus
Reading Taha by Lamplight
Oaxaca
The Blessing of the Poodles
House of Refuge
What the Pig Meant
Walter at the Wheel
Watch Battery
Lunch at the Brew Moon
In Response to My Fear That I’ll Receive
Another Cal from the Yacht Salesman
IV. What Now?
My Happiness
Landlocked
The Blue Boat
When My Book Group Reconvened after
So Many Years
In November
The Reason for the Child
The Bad Singers of San Miguel de Allende
The Rowboat, The Girl, The Light
Love Poem
Fame
To Teaching
How to Improvise
A Summer Afternoon
The Light
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE