Bluestone: New and Selected Poems

Bluestone: New and Selected Poems

<p><b>A generous selection that shows the poet James Lasdun at his lyrically inventive best</b><br /><b></b><br />Two men grapple with jumper cables, trying "to make a stand // in this last corner of our realm; machinery . . ." A man on his way to see his therapist encounters a female police officer in an elevator and feels himself regressing to "the original essence, the masculine / criminal salt." A teenager is tricked into eating a spoonful of lime pickle by his girlfriend's father. An Englishman in the Catskills ponders the nature of exile, is chased by yellow jackets, gets a haircut. James Lasdun's subjects are often quotidian—but his treatment of them never is. Under his transformative gaze, the familiar becomes strange, the local becomes foreign, and the minor becomes epic.<br /> Lasdun has been winning acclaim since his first collection, 1988's <i>A Jump Start</i>—Helen Vendler has lauded his ability to give "brisk shape to contemporary and classical events"; <i>The New York Times</i> has praised the "sharp, slicing imagery" of his work. Now, in <i>Bluestone</i>, which selects from all three of his previous collections and includes poems from his fourth, <i>Water Sessions</i>, previously available only in the U.K., readers will be able to appreciate the full sweep of this capacious talent: his delicate wit, his gift for invention, his keen observational eye. It is a gathering that affirms Lasdun's position as, to quote Anthony Hecht, one of "the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English."</p>