No other poet now writing is more alert from word to word or registers the world with Michael O'Brien's oblique precision. Sills is a large event: our first comprehensive look at a neglected American master. -- August Kleinzahler In a way that few contemporary books of poetry can claim to be, Sills is an authentic companion to living, in the midst of radios, waiting rooms, ferryboats, eyelids, fine rain, and everything else to which this poetry is constantly awake. -- Geoffrey O'Brien Some writers expand, others contract. Over the years O'Brien has pared his poetry to essentials. He shapes this matter in many forms, and the resulting music is declarative, terse, and elegant. No ornament blurs the reader's intense pleasure. -- William Corbett Sills, perches, diacritical perspectives on a late world as seen from its very edge: the poetry of Michael O'Brien teeters between the given and the intuited, the perceived and the proposed. As with all significant creative works, his is born of an inherent contradiction. What O'Brien's eye catches in its relentless observation of an exhausted age ("the rain washing the world away"), his ear, his wonderfully keen lyric acuity, as if refutes, offers up an alternative of its own. ("A vowel/to ride on" or later, "Little bones of/the ear, house built/of air.") Speech, in these beautifully executed poems,comes to the rescue of substance. "To live high, up among the cornices, from exception to exception, hearing an earthly music" is, ultimately, what Sills is about. -- Gustaf Sobin
Michael O'Brien was born in Granville, NY in 1939; studied at Fordham, the University of Paris, and Columbia; worked as a librarian; was one of the Eventorium poets, where his first book was published in 1967; taught at Brooklyn and Hunter; worked for many years editing technical publications; wrote The Summer Poems, Conversations at the West End, Blue Springs, Veil, Hard Rain, The Ruin, The Floor and the Breath, 17 Songs, At Schoodic, Sills, Six Poems, Swift Moons Repair Celestial Losses, and Sleeping and Waking. He lives in New York.
Memory finally connects everything with everything, as if the world
were an immense pun: a broadside, against the grain, every synapse
firing. O’Brien records this pun with a verve and zeal that is both
remarkably fresh and reliably consistent. His wit and speed are
ready vehicles for a quite frequently skeptical engagement with the
world around him. We should feel lucky to have these poems gathered
under one roof.
*Chicago Review*
A poet who’d come to Crane’s girdered city to reconcile everything
found the modesty to brave a nature poem about New York. It’s not
that he filtered out the din to find a landscape in repose; it was
the human sounds and voices that taught him how to hear those
aspects of the natural in the city – like rain and the keening,
essentially human need to be touched ... Longing, for virtually
every poet in the city after Baudelaire, is stirred by visual
recognition. O’Brien’s happens in the ear. O’Brien started to hear
a city that no one else had ever heard.
*Bookforum*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
