Intimate Letters
The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book VII
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781770412125
- Publish Date
- Oct 2014
- List Price
- $18.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781770906181
- Publish Date
- Oct 2014
- List Price
- $14.99
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
Intimate Letters comprises the seventh book of an ongoing long poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Its title borrows from a string quartet by Leo Jánacek, a profoundly emotional piece written late in the composer’s life when he had fallen in love with a younger woman. It also points towards the intimacy of letters themselves, the visible pieces that make up language. This collection begins with love poems, then moves to a section (“Wretched in This Alone”) dominated by loss. The “Invisible Ghazals” which follow take language and emotions more deeply into a sense of dispossession, a landscape of the heart characterized by feeling unmoored. “Desire,” the final poem, and the only piece in conventional poetic lines, attempts to rescue the heart from bleakness by proposing that passion does survive even the most difficult and demanding experiences, and “runs through our days like / music.”
About the author
Bruce Whiteman is a Canadian poet and writer living in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Visible Stars: New and Selected Poems (1995), Tristia, and XXIV Love Poems (2002). He regularly writes reviews for Canadian and American journals, and his scholarly books include Lasting Impressions: A Short History of English Publishing in Quebec (1994) and J.E.H. Macdonald (1995).
Other titles by
Work to Be Done
Selected Essays and Reviews
Best Canadian Essays 2021
The Sad Mechanic Exercise
Tablature
The Invisible World Is in Decline
Poems
Visible Stars
New and Selected Poems
Lasting Impressions
A Short History of English Publishing in Quebec
Full Sun
Selected Poems of Ken Norris
The Letter of John Sutherland, 1942-1956
