| Summary: | "In this dreamy collection, human features stand out as distinct then blend into the nature of the world surrounding them. We can't always tell plant from animal from mineral, and Roberson reminds us that in the end, as in poetry, such distinctions are moot."ùCamille T. Dungy.
"Ed Roberson's labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book."ùNathaniel Mackey.
In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, spoken in his unique voice and seen through his keen eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination all interweave in these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and our manifold interconnections. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to them.
Roberson's poems range widely through different scales of time and space, invoking along the way history and myth, galaxies and garbage trucks, teapots and the history of photography, mating cranes and Chicago's political machine. This collection is composed of five sequences, each developing a particular constellation of images and ideas related to the vision of the whole. Various journeys join to become oneùan epic journey, invoking epic themes. There are songs of creation, pictures of the sorrows of war, celebrations of human labor and human society, a respect for tools and domestic utensils that are well made. In these poems, the deep background of the past tinges the colors of the present, and we hear the tragic tones of endings and laments, a pervading awareness of the tears in things. Most of all, we experience the exhilaration of a grand, sweeping Vision that enlarges our world. --Book Jacket.
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