Now We're Getting Somewhere

By David Clewell

Book Overview

David Clewell's graceful, honest lines accumulate and remind us that poems can be as tangible, as substantial, as redemptive as those things the poet will not let go unspoken in the world. His compassionate witness is born out of immersion in doggedly bittersweet particulars: the cockeyed wisdom of 1950s science fiction movies; Do Not Disturb signs; vegetarian physics; the perils of bed-and-breakfast lodging; flying saucer disciples; what to do in case of Rapture; Debbie Fuller, reluctant childhood angel; the theory and practice of Spontaneous Human Combustion. His passionate transformation of that raw data into song-no matter how fragile or raucous-provides irrefutable testimony about the consequences of being nothing less than human, where "every day someone crawls out of his ocean of sleep / and takes those first tottering steps on the planet again, / he's playing with real fire." And with Clewell's insistence on the unlikely grace in that condition, along with the generosity of his unabashed inclusiveness, his poetry is a powerful antidote to the bad medicine we're too often asked to swallow.
This is a book of sustenance, of fresh assurances that come to us-ready or not-out of the blue of this spirited poet's most engaging work yet.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299144143
• ISBN13: 9780299144142
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Wishful Thinking

I wish you would buy this book. You need this book. Everyone you know needs a copy of this book. The holidays are coming up. Birthdays, Anniversaries, Mondays. All good reasons to get this book and give it to someone you care about. Your life will be better for it--his or her life will be better for it--I promise. It's all about seeing the world clearly and loving it anyway, or rather, because.

Clewell arrives

This volume marks Clewell's arrival in the realm of poetry that contributes something substantial to literature. It's not as inspired on the whole as _The Conspiracy Quartet_, which is his best book to date, but it contains some of his best individual poems.