The Invisible World Is in Decline
Poems
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781550227475
- Publish Date
- Aug 2006
- List Price
- $19.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781550224375
- Publish Date
- Sep 2000
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
Rooted in the Modernist tradition of writers like William Carlos Williams and indebted to Canadians like bpNichol, The Invisible World Is In Decline is a philosophical, erotic, and highly personal prose poem. At the same time, it takes on the Postmodern challenges of engaging concerns that extend beyond the autobiographical. Whiteman investigates spiritual crisis, love, and the struggle through language to make sense of what it is to be human in a world where the human seems to be all that is available.
The Invisible World Is In Decline pays homage to earlier writers of both the long poem and the impersonal love lyric: Coleridge, Lautréamont, Spicer, and Zukofsky. Responsive to the everyday, the particular, and to the body, Whiteman explores the grand ways in which poetry has come to shape language and experience in the last century. The prose poem form allows for images and music to sometimes predominate over shape and sense in what poet Robert Creeley once called “a wild exultation.” In the end, it moves towards a human paradise where love, thought, and language are in perfect attunement, and where poetry can say so.
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
Intimate Letters
The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book VII
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
