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2 books match the query 'Garland, Max'
The Postal Confessions
Max Garland
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
These poems wrestle with the inherited myths of their particular time and place. Often set in a small corner of western Kentucky, they explore moments when an individual life becomes implicated in a larger scheme—the realm of Cold War politics, the mysteries of religious faith, the codes and rituals of romantic love. Max Garland shows a lyrical determination to deal with history through the lives, minds, and emotions of ordinary people “stricken with time.”
In poems about baptism, bowling, Greek goddesses, and the hydrogen bomb, Garland seems to say that knowledge and even revelation might come from anywhere. The book ends with the image of the empty space Michelangelo left between the hands of Adam and God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; that tension between what lasts and what passes away, comprises the territory of these poems.
The Word We Used For It
Max Garland
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In these poems Max Garland confesses, even revels in, the fabricated nature of memory. He links personal and localized patterns (fingerprints, plowed fields) to the motions animating the insides of atoms and the unfurling of remote galaxies. Back on earth, the poems honor the decidedly homespun quality of grit—how creatures both animal and human bear up in the face of mounting odds against them. Garland suggests that imagination itself requires grit, to be called upon when the more spectacular angels are otherwise occupied.