Wild Civility

by David Biespiel

Book Overview

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."

The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.

Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295983523
• ISBN13: 9780295983523
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Length: 69 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

New American Poetry: Operatic, Unique, and Worth the Effort

This book is cutting edge stuff. The monologues are like arias: they are a portrait of a probing mind. Biespiel, unlike a whole lot of his contemporaries, trusts the medium itself. I have to say that after my first read through I found the work teetered on a mannerism, but then I just had to read it a second and third time (dictionary is a must here...some of the language is really lavish!) because the poems seemed so entirely unique. It was then that I understood how that these poems are terrifically new (yes, Mr. Pound, someone can still "make it new"). His calling these poems "American sonnets" is a real dare. American poetry needs to be whipped up and feverish. Biespiel is at the forefront. I wish other poets challenged us dedicated poetry readers the same way.

Wow! Incredible!

I read this poet's first book, "Shattering Air" (BOA), and little there prepared me for this one. It's an enormous departure, and my first reaction was "Wow! Incredible! Finally, something that breaks the style of decades of garden-variety, flat, tepid, music-less, formless free verse American poetry!" The writing in Biespiel's new book is so vibrant. It's unlike anything out there. Entirely unique and dramatic (though a dictionary is required!). "Wild Civility" rocks with rowdy, tempestous, lyric poems about the poet's hard drinking, hard partying days, his ambivalence toward faith and prayer, and his yearning for home--all in a blazing new form, his invented 9-line "American sonnet." Bold, to say the least (and his Preface at the beginning is even bolder--a must read to understand the dramatic voices he incorporates into his own). The language can be overwhelming, I have to admit, but the poems do what (I think) poems should do--tell the truth and reach deep inside of me.