Dusty Angel

By Michael Blumenthal

Book Overview

Dusty Angel Michael Blumenthal The winner of the 1999 Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, Dusty Angel is the work of a poet at the pinnacle of his considerable talent. Blumenthal's themes of love,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880238810
• ISBN13: 9781880238813
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: BOA Editions
• Length: 75 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Dusty Angel by Michael Blumenthal

Dusty Angel by Michael Blumenthal "The profane and the sacred, the noble and the daemonic": the balance of these in one life is one of the recurring themes in Michael Blumenthal's new book Dusty Angel. The book has many moments of affirmation and hope. At several points in the book, the poet highlights the importance of joy and pleasure in our lives. After watching the antics of a house cat, Blumenthal concludes: What can we learn from him who lives here, neutered, wormed, domesticated, curled? - How to reanimate again our lifeless world. ("Le Chat")In another poem, he observes, "Pleasure is something we need / To center us - holy - wherever we find it." ("Saxophone"). In other poems, he presents a dark vision of fate: Who among us wouldn't gladly be the chooser, if only the choice weren't a vast road looping over and over to arrive at the same place? ("The Forces") Mr. Blumenthal is a graduate of an Ivy League law school. But these poems sound not in law, but in the nineteenth century philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. "The Wasp in the Study," for instance, presents an allegory of subject and object, the mind and the outside world. Like a wasp trapped indoors, the mind remains a captive of the room it's in, a tomb of many-colored windows with no door to test the scintillating glass it sets its visions of escape against. Sometimes, Blumenthal seems naïve, such as in a poem about the Palestinian intifada in which he seems to say "there is so much beauty in the land of Israel; why can't we all be friends?" ("Anti-fada"). On the other hand, one of the most moving poems describes the succession of generations through the image of a father and son skiing: I am still better at this than he is, though I won't be for long, and so he follows me down the white hills of the Sangre de Cristos, he who wants to be better than his father is, as I've tried to be better than mine, though the trails and rivulets of paternity are deep, marked in greens and blues and, finally, blacks to signify the most difficult . . . These poems are very personal but at the same time they describe universal problems and ideas. The language is never obscure and the images are fresh. This is a very enjoyable book by one of America's best poets.