Signs & Abominations

by Bruce Beasley

Poems search for signs of the divine amid the abominations of the profane and the materials of language itself.

Signs and Abominations is a radical tour de force that interrogates the relationship between religion and art at the end of the 20th century in penetrating and sensuous prosody. It can be read as a series of damaged likenesses: humans as the damaged image and likeness of God, poems and other works of art as necessarily incomplete...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819564567
• ISBN13: 9780819564566
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up

Customer Reviews

Amazing Weaving of Scared and Profane

Bruce Beasley has done what so few poets actually do: accomplish what they state their intentions to be. In mixing the scatological artwork of the 1990's with intense visionary threads from his life, the works of others such as Flannery O'Conner, and theological ideas, Beasley creates a fine visionary volume of poetry. A volume that seems to be in constant dialogue with the art it is relating itself to and the poems themselves. Form seems to slide in and out as the poems shift between abstract through and poetic reflection. The areas of both geographical region and of religious experience can mixed. The transgressions here are recursive and allusive. The shocks are not for shock's sake. An excellent book.

Transformation, Mutation, Invitation, Rebuke

This book of poetry is for the reader who likes a challenge--who is willing to explore the sacred and the profane togetherunflinchingly as they emerge in art, scripture, and daily life. It isnot for the faint of stomach. Beasley explores contemporary issuessuch as the ... Christ, the male and female body, genetic cloning,and the return to form in poetry-- using langauge that is at timesdelicate and sensitive and others graphic and specific. If you area risk taker, if you are at times meditative and at others fiercelyhungry to question assumptions-- this book is for you. Beasley is anintense questioner-- and he as a poet is constantly being transformedas a result. If you do not question, if you cannot accept paradox, ifyou cannot tolerate the blurring of the boundary between whatconstitutes a sign and what mutatates a sign into an abomination--then this book is not for you. The opening poem is a meditiationon John the Baptist-- in many religious works of art, John the Baptiststands in the corner, looking intently towards the viewer of thepainting. While everyone else looks at the center of the scene-- beit Mary, Jesus, Joseph-- John the Baptist looks away. Beasley isfascinated with this apparent contradiction-- John the Baptist seemsto be saying, "look at me," inviting the viwer to make eyecontact-- but then also says, "Look away, I'm not what you aresupposed to be looking at." This simultaneous invitation andrebuke frames the rest of the poems. We are invited to explore, tomeet the gaze of the mad prophet-- yet at the same time we arefrightened. We want to look at the images presented -- the ...Christ, the male female body, the virgin-- the way we have alwayslooked at them. To meet the invitation is to be transformed. We areseduced and then repelled as we realize what we are doing; then we areseduced again with Beasley's lyric intensity and fast furiouslanguage. There are many interconnected themes in the rest of thepoems: of birth, of renewal, of life, of death. One of the moststriking poems is a mutated villanelle-- where the speaker of the poemmuses on the obsession of the mad scientist Seed who wants toimpregnate his wife Gloria with his DNA-- Beasley takes the tradional,obsessive form of the villanelle and lets it transform into a totallynew form. Whether the result is a mutation or transformation, a signor an abomination-- that lies with the reader. Beasley is truly amaster poet-- he experiments with form, content, truth, sacrilege, andinpiration to give us a book that will push, invite, rebuke, andtransform the reader. END