Brother Fire: Poems

by W.S. Di Piero

In this rich collection, W. S. Di Piero seeks the spirit and substance of illumination in all its forms. He finds meaning, or shows us how we attempt to do so, in the rituals and events that mark our... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400042038
• ISBN13: 9781400042036
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

poetry you can sink your teeth into

I've read Di Piero since the 1970's. His work has become much meatier, more vivid, and more assessable. The Library of Congress cataloged this book as both religious poetry and erotic poetry! I don't know about that, but it is full of spirit . . . and fire.

Di Piero digs back into South Philly & breaks through to new power

This collection continues, first of all, a splendid poet's investigation of his home ground -- postwar Italian-American South Philly. This process began in the previous collection, the likewise powerful SKIRTS & SLACKS, with its meditations on the deaths of his immigrant mother and father. But here Di Piero demonstrates more developed mastery, varying shapes and sonic effects (though relying most on a jazzy American variation of blank verse) while sustaining terrific visual specificity and startling uprushes of sprituality. In so doing, the poet generates fresh and stinging coherence about both irretrievable loss and ineradicable yearning. A poem like "Prayer Meeting," like "Ortleib's Uptown Taproom," brings off a tour de force that never lacks the common touch. Also, "Brother Fire" was St. Francis's metaphor for (among other things) all our bodily desires, burning and quenchless, and this book takes on the same impossible subject, finally, bravely. The concern emerges both in the meditations on Philly past and present, and in other poems, superficially about art, food, or love. In all, the human capacity for want, presented both as folly and as transcendence, rules these pages like a "deity of hurt and rue."