Signs & Wonders

by Charles Martin

Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press

Series: Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

Imprint: John Hopkins University

Sales Date: 2011-04-04

Hardcover

CA$44.95

Published: April 2011

Product Details

Imprint: John Hopkins University

Series: Series: Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

Page Count: 96 Pages

Dimensions: 5.50 x 8.50

96 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.50 in

Hardcover

CA$44.95

ISBN: 9780801899744

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Description
Authors
Contents
Reviews
Awards

Winner of the CNY Book Award in Poetry of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse

Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB);
Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb.

The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world is to be read into and wondered over. The signs in this new work from the prize-winning American poet of formal brilliance and darkly comic sensibility are as stark as the one on a cage at the zoo that says ENDANGERED SPECIES, as surprising as those that announce the return of irony, and as enigmatic as a single word carved on a tombstone. Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.

Two of Charles Martin’s earlier collections of poetry, What the Darkness Proposes and Steal the Bacon, were published by Johns Hopkins, as was his translation, The Poems of Catullus. In 2005 he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Directions for Assembly
I. The Life in Letters
The Flower Thief
Souvenir
Some Kind of Happiness
The Sacred Monsters
Words to Utter at Nightfall
Mind in the Trees
Autopsychography
Support
East Side, West Side
1. Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid
2. John Koch at the New-York Historical Society: The Party
To Himself
Brooklyn in the Seventies
This Organizing Solitude
This Organizing Solitude
Theory Victorious
II. Some Romans
On a Roman Perfume Bottle
Ava Pacis
Ovid to His Book
Three Sonnets from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli
1. The Good Soldiers
2. The Spaniard
3. The Coffee House Philosopher
III. Near Jeffrey's Hook
The Twentieth Century in Photographs
Poem for the Millennium
Who Knows What's Best?
Getting Carded
For the End of the Age of Irony
Near Jeffrey's Hook
Foreboding
After 9/11
After Wang Wei
Poison
Acknowledgments

"'After 9/11' is alone worth the price of the book and will repay many readings, but all the poems share important virtues. They’re sonically pleasing and rich in allusion, but they’re also direct. Here there are no cryptic, difficult poems on the attack. Nothing here is pointless, and much is beautiful. All works toward a fruitful clarity and invites us to think hard about what bones we and Martin have built on."
Maryann Corbett, Contemporary Poetry Review

"If you need to be reminded, or to discover, why Martin is considered a master, pick up your own copy of Signs & Wonders."
Alexander Pepple, Think Journal

CNY Book Award in Poetry

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