The Pleasures of C

By Edward Smallfield

Poetry. "Like his exemplar, Edward Weston, Smallfield uses 'no aperture except his lens' to deliver 'bodies without body' and truths that are sensual, difficult and powerful in their claims on the reader. These are poems of thrilling uneasiness and probing reward" -- Kathleen Fraser. "though the poet attests, 'I was lost/ and have been/ lost/ ever since,' these poems are firmly grounded in a generosity of impulse and meaning which orient the reader to the poetic journey undertaken. At the end of that wandering, Edward Smallfield shows us the habitation of the poem: for all the foreignness it can encompass, the reader comes upon this site as its door ist ajar. Entering, one feels uncannily at home" -- Elizabeth Robinson.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966993764
• ISBN13: 9780966993769
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Apogee Press
• Length: 77 Pages

Customer Reviews

The Principal Pleasure

The Pleasures of C is book that not only rewards frequent rereadings, but demands them. The poems again and again invoke the great modernist arts of jazz and photography as grand, continuous, integrative conceits. As one explores the work's peculiar synesthetic depths, one finds oneself drawn back and forth from poem to poem, sensing a life's worth of reading, listening, thinking, and feeling condensed in them. One poem in particular haunts, "A Simple Metaphor." Where in our time has poetry come so close to the Poundian ideal, "language charged with meaning to the utmost possible extent," so close to fixing life itself in words we can speak?