Earth's Ends

by Andrew Kaufman

Winner of the 2003 Pearl Poetry Prize

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888219270
• ISBN13: 9781888219272
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Pearl Editions
• Length: 83 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

largest of hearts

Andrew Kaufman's poems are beautiful and stark, like a black-and-white etching, or a photograph, you find yourself unable to stop looking at. This collection, Earth's Ends, takes us to earth's ends, both literally and figuratively. It transports us to places, emotional and real, most of us don't dare to visit. The language is simple and direct and poignant - there is no attempt to "poeticize," to obscure, or to be clever. These are poems from the largest of hearts.

Earth's Ends by Andrew Kaufman

Andrew Kaufman takes us into dangerous places where 20th century violence sits atop ancient civilizations, and the present is brutishly impoverished. In lovely and tremulous lines, the poet says "to write the first uncertain notes of a poem when you wake up is to wake the way the birds do," and yet his task is interrupted by small children coming into the hooch to watch him. It is this clamoring humanity that competes for his attention and provides one of the book's thematic tensions. The poet in his search for the sacred finds it in a flawed present; the ethereal existing alongside or within the profane. Earth's Ends juxtaposes stupas with Nescafe cans, gods with rock music on boom boxes and pig slaughter. These poems are more than observation, they are a distillation of experience and revelation. The language is at times wonderfully colloquial and always lyrical, the phrasing finely wrought. In "The Story of the Universe," the lines are short and suspended, they surround themselves in air as they drift down the page. "Her gaze is set/on infinity. Its vacancy/is filled/with the invisible sea/Its water is God." In Earth's Ends, Kaufman has crafted poems so skillfully that you don't notice convention or form, the reader simply steps into them. We hear the myriad voices of children. An innocence that one guesses is soon to be offered up on the altar of survival. Yet it's not horror that we take away from this collection but the wonder at being alive that asserts itself in all places and at all times. A girl-child asks, "...When you go/ back to New York will you remember me?/Will you write a poem for me, just for me,/and send it?" Earth's Ends is that poem. It gives the satisfaction of a novel within the compression of a poem. There's not much better out there.