Buffalo Head Solos

By Tim Seibles

Book Overview

Poetry. "Reading Tim Seibles reminds me of the Buddhist parable of the burning house: everyone ignores the flames, pretends there is no smoke, no pain, no prospect of death. Or, if there is, it will only happen to someone else, someone in another world. According to these teachings, aversion and attachment are not the greatest barriers to fulfillment; it is indifference that endangers a soul. Not to embrace or confront what is undeniably there but to detach ourselves and retreat. It is precisely this indifference that these poems challenge with lyric insistence - begging, assailing, teasing, affirming. In this mystical, romantic and political collection, Seibles is willing to take a chance, any chance to engage the general malaise of our times. He is a musician of the spirit and of the body, and it is that quality which carries us forward breath by breath, line by line. The journey is oddly enchanting, even transformative"--Nin Andrews.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880834634
• ISBN13: 9781880834633
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Master of Verse

Time Seibles is a master of verse, of the image and the line--this work is vintage Seibles, surprising, brilliant, yet simple--fun to read.

Urgent, fearless and necessary

"...[T]here are things far worse than speaking out of turn," writes Tim Seibles in the "Open Letter" that begins his fourth full-length collection of poetry. BUFFALO HEAD SOLOS is poetry at its most urgent, fearless and necessary. Again and again he accurately names what ails us: And still, we keep turning from the sound like two-legged animals all buttoned and zipped unwilling to recognize this tall ladder of bones to which we cling briefly with our small teeth. And because we do not see well into the future because we are busy taking as much as we can get because money has infected these days with its prolific germ, what surrounds us looks like forever but it is not -- from "Ladder" But Seibles isn't interested in preaching -- at least not in the deadening way we've come to think of it. He sings a wake-up call directly to our cells, summoning us back to our bodies, our voices, our imaginations: Listen. We belong to no nation. One day we will hold the earth again as if She were a love nearly lost, Her rainy hair tangled in our hands. from "Late Shift" With BUFFALO HEAD SOLOS, Tim Seibles reinvents language daring and delicious enough to carry his songs. In a time when, as he writes in "Really Breathing," "evil wears some really sexy clothes," these poems burn a clear light.