Bøker av John Latta

It's in the gnarled wonders of its diction that John Latta's poetry has its most immediate charm. The 130 poems of SOME ALPHABETS fizz between levels of diction--the demotic, the formal, the high theoretical, the archaic, the futuristic, the expansive, the pinched, the ordinary and the just plain weird--so that every sixteen-line stanza becomes a foray into the delightful unexpected. Latta has always had a way with words, a kind of weighty insouciance everywhere evident in Rubbing Torsos and Breeze, his previous collections: the ability to spin out simultaneously concrete sensual observation, offhanded bon mot, and penetrating insight. Some Alphabets focuses that linguistic multi-tasking to an abbreviated, impacted pitch, and stirs into the mix a dark and glittering compost of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language. . . . 'Stubbled profligate, I / Paw th'ancients, who paw me.' --Mark Scroggins, from the IntroductionPoetry.

In these carefully crafted poems, John Latta traces the process of language attempting to align its measure against the amplitude of the world. His writing recognizes the futility of representing the world while braving the caprice of trying to do so.