The Hope Of The Air

By Barry Spacks

An extensive collection of recent work by a poet who ranges widely in themes and techniques, The Hope of the Air offers a cornucopia of heart-felt insight, meditation, and celebration as it evokes a life on the contemporary scene observed with humor, perception, and brilliant invention.
Spacks' latest work is concerned with the crystallization of emotion in words, with new angles of vantage that allow feelings to shimmer and deepen as the record of immediate experience lilts and takes unexpected turns on the Dickinsonian "slant" toward larger meanings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870137328
• ISBN13: 9780870137327
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Length: 109 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

An absorbing treasury of simple reflections

The Hope of the Air is a collection of poems by songwriter, actor, literature teacher and award-winning poet Barry Spacks. Each poem is no longer than a page or two, but all have an indefinable lighter-than-air quality that lends a whispered, lingering impression upon one's consciousness. An absorbing treasury of simple reflections, sometimes witty, sometimes wistful, upon the simple challenges and celebrations of daily life. "Message to the Widower": In an envelope in a favorite book / she left him her final message: a lock // of her hair... and with it the thought that she knew / surely one day he would find it there // and how he would feel, / finding it there.

the axe that smashes the frozen sea of the heart

If, as Franz Kafka says, literature is the axe that smashes the frozen sea of the heart, then after reading this book your heart will be in smithereens. Buy it, buy it, buy it.