Here is a unique and unmistakable voice for our moment. -- Paul Mariani In My Father's House is simply one of the most powerful books of poems I have read in a long, long time. Hodgen celebrates our humanity as he looks, unblinking, at the misery of the world with intensity, integrity, and compassion. -- Jim Daniels John Hodgen's book is a remarkable achievement, with poem after poem facing the relentlessness of the world and delivering life to us with clarity and an art so deft as to seem invisible. -- Vern Rutsala
John Hodgen is Writer in Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of four previous books of poetry: In My Father's House, winner of the Bluestem Award; Bread Without Sorrow, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; Grace, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; and Heaven & Earth Holding Company, a 2011 Massachusetts Book Award winner. Hodgen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Grolier Prize, the Foley Poetry Prize, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Chad Walsh Prize, and inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017.
"My Father's House is a genuine and rare accomplishment. Art criticism is often at its best when, rather than dissecting objects, it follows their rhythms, twists, and turns. Thomas Dumm does just that. One of this book's many strengths is the variety of ways that he evocatively relates the experience of Will Barnet's paintings. Another is the magnificent introduction, which brings Emerson, Melville, and Cavell, and others into conversation with the spirit of Barnet's work and with Barnet himself." "Thomas Dumm's unique intelligence, perceptual clarity and philosophical erudition inform this powerful homage to the artist Will Barnet and his series of paintings, My Father's House. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Benjamin and Stanley Cavell are among those summoned to assist Dumm as he meditates on questions of place and person, loss and love, past and present, conjured for him by Barnet's haunting and haunted works. This is a deeply moving account of how an encounter with art might allay the turbulent loneliness of our age." "In this beautiful book, Thomas Dumm invents a new genre of writing, neither art criticism nor memoir nor philosophy nor psychology but something drawing from each of those, something that tries to show more than describe how works of art have power, a disseminating, productive power that exceeds any biography. Dumm is an extraordinary writer and courageous thinker." "This meditative book by Dumm [...] is not so much art criticism or art history as "a written narrative accompanying a visual biography of a family." [...] Dumm examines and interprets Barnet's work, as well as using the paintings to explore loneliness, the relationship between past and future, and the ideas and lives of such writers and thinkers as Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin, and Thoreau. [...] In captivating fashion, readers are invited into this uncanny space of nostalgia and loss." - Publishers Weekly
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
