University of Iowa Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-1-60938-400-5 | Paper: 978-1-60938-399-2 Library of Congress Classification PS3602.L335A6 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful.
From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
John Blair’s work has appeared in literary journals such as Poetry, the New York Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, the Antioch Review, and New Letters. His poetry collection The Green Girls won the 2003 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and his short story collection American Standard was awarded the 2002 Drue-Heinz Literature Prize. Blair is a professor of American literature and directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.
REVIEWS
“John Blair is one of those poets who can do almost anything with a line: make it hum, make it fly—‘to fill the space where wings once sung in you.’ Playful Song Called Beautiful presents musings on mortality that’ll make you glad to be alive.”—David Galef, author, My Date with Neanderthal Woman
“In these poems, a foodie banquet of delicious, exotic, risky platters of language glides before us. The dark and grit of a Baudelaire becomes the elegance of a Yeats, or the logic of an Auden gives way to the effervescent mysteries of a Rimbaud. In these wonderful meditations upon the world’s uncertainties, we’re thrilled by the dangerous, delightful turns.”—John Bensko, author, Visitations
“Rife with juicy epigraphs, gleeful alliteration, and dynamic enjambment, John Blair’s latest book feels like philosophy filtered through wit and joy. Who could have imagined that insouciance and insight, though they share a prefix, could seem so akin, but here comes Playful Song Called Beautiful as proof.”—Cyrus Cassells
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
How to Know Two
Dirt
To a Girl Walking Away From the British Museum
The Idle Hours
Blue Moon
The Horse
A Philosophy of Gravity
Disagreeable Things
The One Thing
What Happens to the Future
The Truth You Heard
Sleeping Dogs Lie
Goethe’s Apple
Three Quarks for Muster Mark
A Song on Geronimo’s Grave
The Law of the Excluded Middle
Hard Pearl
The Lesser Poet
And Yet It Moves
Playful Song Called Beautiful
The Lost Children
The Thing Itself Speaks
What We Want
Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit
Evil Pockets
Desirada
The Ghosts of Birds
Why You Leave
If I Should Die Before I Wake
The Gift
What Happens When You Stop
What is Left
Dog Dreams
Mésalliance Grotesque
Turing Lies with Men
Blood Rain at Stoke Edith
Here Where We Are Terrible
The Things You Can’t Keep
Shooting Dove
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 Iowa Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-1-60938-400-5 Paper: 978-1-60938-399-2
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful.
From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
John Blair’s work has appeared in literary journals such as Poetry, the New York Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, the Antioch Review, and New Letters. His poetry collection The Green Girls won the 2003 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and his short story collection American Standard was awarded the 2002 Drue-Heinz Literature Prize. Blair is a professor of American literature and directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.
REVIEWS
“John Blair is one of those poets who can do almost anything with a line: make it hum, make it fly—‘to fill the space where wings once sung in you.’ Playful Song Called Beautiful presents musings on mortality that’ll make you glad to be alive.”—David Galef, author, My Date with Neanderthal Woman
“In these poems, a foodie banquet of delicious, exotic, risky platters of language glides before us. The dark and grit of a Baudelaire becomes the elegance of a Yeats, or the logic of an Auden gives way to the effervescent mysteries of a Rimbaud. In these wonderful meditations upon the world’s uncertainties, we’re thrilled by the dangerous, delightful turns.”—John Bensko, author, Visitations
“Rife with juicy epigraphs, gleeful alliteration, and dynamic enjambment, John Blair’s latest book feels like philosophy filtered through wit and joy. Who could have imagined that insouciance and insight, though they share a prefix, could seem so akin, but here comes Playful Song Called Beautiful as proof.”—Cyrus Cassells
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
How to Know Two
Dirt
To a Girl Walking Away From the British Museum
The Idle Hours
Blue Moon
The Horse
A Philosophy of Gravity
Disagreeable Things
The One Thing
What Happens to the Future
The Truth You Heard
Sleeping Dogs Lie
Goethe’s Apple
Three Quarks for Muster Mark
A Song on Geronimo’s Grave
The Law of the Excluded Middle
Hard Pearl
The Lesser Poet
And Yet It Moves
Playful Song Called Beautiful
The Lost Children
The Thing Itself Speaks
What We Want
Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit
Evil Pockets
Desirada
The Ghosts of Birds
Why You Leave
If I Should Die Before I Wake
The Gift
What Happens When You Stop
What is Left
Dog Dreams
Mésalliance Grotesque
Turing Lies with Men
Blood Rain at Stoke Edith
Here Where We Are Terrible
The Things You Can’t Keep
Shooting Dove
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