West Pullman

By Carolyn Guinzio

Book Overview

Carolyn Guinzio writes moving poems of great delicacy, balancing opposites and adjacents at once. She also writes a kind of sentence that switches mid-run like a train on its tracks, re-casting its syntax without so much as a how-do-you-do. Through the curtain of birds and insects, or the scrim made of the lives of unadorned citizens, she allows us to "press so close to the unfamiliar" without making it any less strange. This is a gifted poet's gifted first book. - Susan Wheeler "Nothing ever travels more / than half-way away," are lines in Carolyn Guinzio's wonderful first book. The tug away and toward one's place is at the center of this volume, the "musty nativity" that one carries through life like a muse. The farther away you get from "the old women ambling to mass / in babushkas and black wool coats," the more insistent they become. These poems are rooted in the ethereal grit of the actual but also reach astonishingly into that beauty Wallace Stevens called the real - a world made fresh by imagination: "We are meant to see / into the water, / into the sky between leaves. / These were two of our many / blue things. Spiders / fatten, listening / with their feet." - Paul Hoover The career of sunlight is complex and astonishing. "A finch on a thistle turns the dome / of its eye," as Guinzio observes and then, astonishingly, pursues through numberless refractions, unprecendented spectra. Seldom is the prism of straightforwardness so fine, so furthering as here. West Pullman shows colors I had only hoped to dream." - Donald Revell

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1884419704
• ISBN13: 9781884419706
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Bordighera Press
• Length: 105 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully Wrought

In West Pullman, Guinzio has written a marvelous book of poems intimately tied to a specific place (the neighborhood of West Pullman, Chicago's south side) yet broadening to include a series of poems on Pacific island birds. The glue that binds the poems together is that they all ask the universal question: "What is it / to be in the world?" Guinzio doesn't provide any easy answers. In fact, these poems are as much about listening as they are about answering that question. One poem implores, "Tell / your story, the great story of one / and many, composed of an imperfect / moment of silence." We are all ultimately alone in this world, but these poems offer solace in the fact that the poet is listening and recording. Guinzio's poems are embedded with the intricate, daily details of our lives, yet they rise to a lyric pitch that is at once beautiful and intense and built on "words that have become / like breath." -- A splendid debut, with more to come in the future, I hope.