Sun bear

Sun bear

Matthew Zapruder, 1967-

Book - 2014

""Zapruder's poems don't merely attempt beauty; they attain it."-The Boston Review"Matthew Zapruder has a razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture."-The New York Times. "With dynamic, logically complex sentences, Zapruder posits a world that is both extraordinary and refreshingly ordinary."-BOMB. Matthew Zapruder's poems begin in the faint inkling, in the bloom of thought, and then unfold into wide-reaching meditations on what it means to live in the contemporary moment, among plastic, statistics, and diet soda. Written in a direct, conversational style, the poems in Sun Bear display full-force why Zapruder is one of the most popular poets in America. From "I Drink Bro...nze Light": Great American summer lakes right now I am flying above you through a rare cloudless transparent sky back to the city where it is always cold even in summer the round hole I press my face against shows only a blue expanse with white sails below speckled exactly the way the Aegean would have been three thousand years ago if one could have seen it from above maybe riding in the dark claw of a god who didn't care. Matthew Zapruder is a poet, translator, and editor at Wave Books. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and his book The Pajamaist won the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many publications, including BOMB, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Believer. He lives in San Francisco, California"--

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Published
Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Matthew Zapruder, 1967- (-)
Physical Description
x, 111 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781556594632
  • I.
  • Sun Bear
  • Aubergine
  • What Can Poetry Do
  • Public Art
  • How Do You Like the Underworld
  • Poem without Intimacy
  • My Childhood
  • Poem for England
  • Poem for Engagement
  • Poem for a Persian Singer
  • Poem for Giants
  • Poem for Japan
  • The Moment
  • II.
  • Korea
  • Poem for Wine
  • Poem for Plutocrats
  • I Drink Bronze Light
  • Poem for Engagement
  • It Is Tuesday
  • Your Eyes Are the Color of a Lightbulb Floating in the Potomac River
  • Poem for Wisconsin
  • Poem for a Coin
  • Poem to a Cloud above a Statue
  • Poem for Massachusetts
  • To Sergio Franchi
  • Poem for Americans
  • III.
  • Poem for Happiness
  • The Heart Is Not a Door
  • Poem for Russia with a White Plastic Wolf
  • Albert Einstein
  • Ode to Fluffy
  • Your Story
  • Poem for Lu Chi
  • Poem for a Vial of Nameless Perfume
  • Poem for Jack Spicer
  • Poem for Bill Cassidy
  • Telegraph Flowers
  • Poem for California
  • American Singer
  • About the Author
Review by Booklist Review

After the imaginative fever of Come on All You Ghosts (2010), Guggenheim fellow Zapruder tones things down in his wry fourth collection. He is ruminative and plain-spoken, forthright and hard-hitting, as in the title poem, in which he pays tribute to a zoo bear and expresses concern about our ability to destroy ourselves and every other living entity. Zapruder is attentive to what we call news, painfully aware that as he reads, people die. I just sit in my room and worry. Yet his humble attentiveness to the world and willingness to convey personal revelations; his open anxiety; tricky, needling humor; and brain-teasing syntax are oddly tonic and reassuring. His short-lined, constricted poems are ladder-like columns down which we tumble. He is riddling and insistent when it comes to accepting ambivalence and ambiguity. Zapruder writes of a long-ago baseball game, radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster, a fruit-fly invasion, terrible governors, a map of the world, contrariness, guilt, and love. And as he ponders the everyday conflation of the trivial and the profound, he refuses any easy out.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Zapruder (Come On All You Ghosts) is at his most meditative and conscious in his fourth collection, displaying a gentle wit and willingness to let the smallest banality open to wider observation. Starkly honest about the state of the natural, human world, Zapruder implicates his own desires-"I need things/ no one can buy// and don't even know/ what they are// I know I belong/ in this new dark age"-and lifestyle-"I want to go to sleep again and wake// somewhere and turn on the faucet/ without feeling as if I am destroying anything/ and drink some coffee that doesn't taste like blood." What buoys the collection is his insistence on making the often disturbing facts of life not simply new, but strange and humorous in their familiarity: "[E]veryone worships us/ because we have declared our love/ they think we have.../ silently pondered/ the philosophical questions/ actually we were talking a lot/ about what we had for lunch." Zapruder grasps both the absurd and tragic in the modern: "When I go to the bank.../ hollow with desire.../ Toward my numbers/ I walk, a tragic/ precursor condemned/ to an easy life/ balanced on the suffering/ in another land/ of strangers I might/ someday speak to/ when I call to complain." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

One thing leads to another-sort of-in this latest from Zapruder, William Carlos Williams Award winner for The Pajamaist. These free verse poems are reminiscent of work by e.e. cummings in their general apperance, lack of punctuation, and surreal, mystical themes. Tumbling effortlessly down the page, they start out as interior observations about everyday happenings set in mundane places such as the grocery store or the zoo or a bedroom. In "Aubergine," for example, the narrator lies in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking about the book he read the previous night. The poem describes what the narrator sees and how he responds until the words begin a kind of free association that ends in a dream or dreamlike state. Initially, Zapruder's -poems exhibit a logical order but then veer off in new directions that do not obviously connect to the previous thought. Yet-and here's the beauty of Zapruder's work-the poetry makes eminent sense partly because Zapruder writes until his subject develops into a poem, and then he stops. Take one of the best poems here, "What Can -Poetry Do," which does not explain what poetry can do. Instead, like all good poetry, it shows how the form does what it does. VERDICT Though these poems possess little coherence and less logic, that's part of their charm-and in fact their point. A worthy addition to most collections.-C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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