Haywire

by George Bilgere

Book Overview

Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087421646X
• ISBN13: 9780874216462
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Laughter and tears

This slim volume of poetry is a treasure--prompting the reader to laugh out loud on one page and bringing a tear to the eye on the next. In the Billy Collins mode, it's poetry that connects.

Listen up...

If you don't like these poems, then you know nothing about poetry. you know nothing about the "craft" of writing, the use of temporal space and the creative genius it takes to tackle the intangibles. There is so much garbage poetry out there that has the emotion of an owner's manual for a leaf blower. Poet's (even some good ones) forget sometimes that average human beings are their target audience, and that Poetry (like all art) is about communicating the human condition."Accessible" poets have been lambasted ad nauseum by intellectual elitists who believe that a great poem is a Rubik's cube that needs to be solved. They forget that a great poet doesn't need to dizzy the reader with linguistic acrobatics to communicate complexity. A great poet can communicate all of the complexities of the world using regular 'ol language. Putting it in layman's terms: if you don't appreciate and respect this poetry, then you don't know a goddamn thing about poetry.

Bilgere's Poetry SUCKS

Yes it sucks you back to a time you feel you lived yourself, into the shoes your feet have walked in, into a dream you've long forgotton only now more vivid. Remarkable..over and over again. Don't let him out of your sight.

Poems that call me back

HAYWIRE was waiting for me when I returned for the GR Dodge Poetry Festival last weekend, and in spite my having just bought books and falling way behind at my to-read stacks, I read HAYWIRE first. Wonderful poems. So touching and well-crafted. I keep re-reading them and asking myself why they are so good-- the shock/startle/aha of the endings, the understatement, the juxtaposition of elements, echoes, great details. All the things teachers tell you to do, AND done so well. When I read "Casablanca," I had a moment of confusion. Then realized, This is a fantasy! NONE of these things happened, which deepened the poignancy of the endings. I loved "Anniversary" and "The Table" and "What Would Jesus Do." And I flagged them to hand-copy to study some more. Bravo! George Bilgere has me as a fan.

Probably the best poetry book I've read in years

To highly recommend this book would be an understatement. I couldn't even count the number of times I've picked up a contemporary poetry book and found myself assaulted by the incomprehensible, pretentious verse of someone with too much cleverness and too little heart--but George Bilgere's "Haywire" is different. Here is a poet who not only walks, but glides with ease down that tightrope between accessibility and intellect, between entertainment and (dare I say it?) enlightenment. He takes risks that few modern, "established" poets are willing to take, and he succeeds to such a degree that he almost makes it look easy. All of this, in my not-so-humble opinion, is exactly what good poetry should do. I also commend Bilgere on not being afraid to address the pink elephant that is pop culture, as he does in "Say My Name", "Simile Practice", and "Norelco". That's something modern poets still largely shy away from, in favor of archaic adaptations of the work of older poets (forgetting, in their ignorance, that these poems were modern when they were written!). But the poems I most admire in this book--"Petroglyphs", "What Would Jesus Do?", and "Waiting"--achieve that delicate blend of good humor and deep sadness that make them, in my opinion, both wonderfully effective and completely essential to the modern canon.