Failure: A Poetry Collection

by Philip Schultz

Book Overview

This superb Pulitzer Prize-winning collection gives voice to failure with a wry, deft touch from one of this country's most engaging and uncompromising poets. In Failure, Philip Schultz evokes the pleasures of family, marriage, beaches, and dogs; New York City in the 1970s; revolutions both interior and exterior; and the terrors of 9/11 with a compassion that demonstrates he is a master of the bittersweet and fierce, the wondrous and direct, and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156031280
• ISBN13: 9780156031288
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Failure

My determination for liking a poem is whether it makes me see or feel a subject in a new or unique way. Philip Shultz succeeds in doing this in the majority of his offerings for this collection--the ironic title not withstanding. There is also a coziness in many of the pieces that settles nicely over one as the poems are read.

Very human and beautiful!!

This work is very touching, deep, serious, human and beautiful. The stories and characters are greatly depicted. We all have failures. This book is a success in taking them up. I am very impressed by it!!

wonderful

still reading it but it's so accessible to a general reader and so full of life.

Welcome back Carver

Apart from Les Murray's works (see, "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow") I haven't felt so moved by poetry since I read Carver's collected works.

Failure: a Smashing Success

Let me say from the get-go that the risky title of this book works better than I could ever have expected. Rather than being a failure, Philip Schultz's fifth book-length collection - his sixth if you count his superb chapbook, "My Guardian Angel Stein" (1986) - illuminates the dim recesses of what it means to be a failure. But this new book does so in a brilliantly successful way. Take Schultz's poems about his hapless father. In previous collections Schultz's portraits of his dad abound with plenty of pathos. In the title poem of his new book, Schultz makes the distinction between a nobody - "You can't remember / a nobody's name, that's why / they're called nobodies" - and a true failure: "Failures are unforgettable." Schultz then proceeds to catalogue and commemorate his father's business failures: "a parking lot that raised geese, / a motel that raffled honeymoons, / a bowling alley with roving mariachis." I find Samuel Schultz's business schemes as hilarious as anything I've heard in the annals of down-and-outers. More than ever before, Schultz's remembrance of things past takes on epic perspective. The poems in "Failure" will hardly ever fail to succeed in bringing you to tears, or such gales of laughter you might as well be listening to one of the greatest stand-up tragi-comic artists of our time. The book's cover photo of a bent nail that's been hammered into wood badly - unsuccessfully - suggests the offbeat - bent out of shape? - funny-sad Eastern European sensibility of someone like Isaac Babel, who stated, "We're all failed sentences. . . / one big lopsided family of relative clauses / who agree on nothing, whose only subject is / how we came to be us, despite our passion for / knowledge, especially while we were still alive." That last zinger of a line crackles with dark humor. The only other American writer alive who can approach Schultz in terms of his sheer wizened wisdom is Philip Roth, who in "Exit Ghost," might just as well be addressing his guardian angel and saying, like his namesake Schultz, "Stein, goodbye." I won't take time to list my faves here; to do so would take another two hundred words. Suffice it to say that the three-pager, "The Adventures of Charles Street," is what Yeats might call a "monument of the soul's magnificence." Like Yeats, Schultz has gotten better and better with every book. Now, in his early 60s, in "Charles Street" he looks back at his salad days in Greenwich Village. Living next door to a cast of characters at least as vivid, with names as wondrous as any in "The Adventures of Augie March," Schultz is "overcome with love for everything so quickly fading." If this line sounds sentimental, Schultz is unafraid of risking sentiment, of speaking out plainly, boldly describing his feelings. In this way he flies in the face of much current poetry that tries to "keep a stiff upper lip" formalistically or to play language games experimentally. Previous books by Schultz have included long poems: In "Lik