Bøker av John Philip Drury

Through their cinematic storytelling, the poems in John Philip Drury's The Teller's Cage swell the heart and the imagination. The book opens with baseball and culminates with persona poems starring the poet's mother, along the way unraveling factual and fantastical chronicles in enchanting locales. Drury's formal prowess is on display throughout this versified blockbuster.PRAISE FOR THE TELLER'S CAGE:In John Philip Drury's The Teller's Cage, in a richly textured tableau in the vein of the late Richard Howard's work, the speaker first reflects upon his younger life only to then, astonishingly, assume the perspective of his mother in a series of masterful persona poems. But most of all, one appreciates the ingeniously formal thrills of these very personal and alive poems. Drury's latest collection presents a uniquely visceral dream of recollection, into which you, dear reader, have been offered the gift of entrance.-Cate Marvin, author of Event Horizon"We're still chameleons who can't help changing," writes John Philip Drury in this new collection that rings the changes on American speech and classical verse forms. Park, Echo, dark, deco: Drury masters the mysteries of rhyme with vernacular charm, both hard rhyme and-legion, moody, curmudgeon, embody-slant. He is also adept at incorporating history into his poems-close to home and further afield. It all fits naturally, thanks to his flexible style and broad-minded curiosity. Yet we sense the presiding spirit of the collection in his tender, deeply lived and felt poems of love and friendship. Drury's formal restlessness, his skill at poetic shapeshifting, offers us a "lexicon of things that morph," moving, in the final poem of each section, from poetry to cinematography as he scripts imaginary films for the theater of the mind. -Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A"Imaginary movies," as John Philip Drury calls the poems in The Teller's Cage, just might be the best movies, at least in the hands of such a formally virtuosic auteur. With historical reach that takes in the brutality of seventeenth-century colonialism, the poet's mother's closeted love in the mid-twentieth century, and the devastating consequences of history in contemporary Venice, and with characters from a renaissance composer to John Waters, Drury's poems explore the imagination as our most essential way of facing facts. They defeat the easiness of nostalgia by insisting on the complexity of circumstances, as if the baroque and the realistic were quite happily sharing a beer after work.-Jordan Smith, author of Little Black TrainABOUT THE AUTHOR:John Philip Drury is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, and Sea Level Rising-from Able Muse Press. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary, both from Writer's Digest Books. His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. He was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and grew up in Bethesda. He earned degrees from Stony Brook University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for thirty-seven years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.

Sea Level Rising, John Philip Drury's fourth collection, revels in water-flowing through rivers, splashing on quays and docked vessels, the wake of speeding boats, the elusive tang of sea salt in the heart of the prairie, even the water of baptism that rebirths the believer. The uplifting lure of water, as with a pair of honeymooners in Venice, may inspire a love "eager to divorce/ anything impeding its energy." Our state of being might mirror water's when "everything's in flux, repeated spasms/ of wake and wave, bright sun, reflecting pool,/ surges made up of intricate detail." The waves of music, like those of water, are also prominent in the musings of this collection, where that which "rises and returns/ approaches music, a blessing/ beyond sound." These are masterfully crafted poems of uncommon inspiration, and they whelm with a celebration and longing for that which ebbs or flows inside us. PRAISE FOR SEA LEVEL RISING:Sea Level Rising is about a lot of things, all in some way the same mystery-why we love tidal waters, why we feel a kinship with the pulse and ebb of time and emptiness, why we feel most alive when we stand at the fractal edges of perception, why the singing of a good poem evokes all those correspondences we can't help loving. John Philip Drury's new poems will please many and please often as he celebrates, and with mastery, the inexhaustible waters before and within each of us. -Dave Smith, author of Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005-2010With candor and a close eye, Drury introduces us to a world of love and literature, nostalgia and new experiences-a world where water pervades everything: a constant and comforting reminder that what we depend on is, like us, also always in flux. Drury is deft at numerous forms, with a delicate touch. You can become so swept up in a poem you may not recognize it as a sonnet until you reach its resounding couplet; but, the beauty of the form-the force of its rhymes and the rapture of their song-has resonated since the opening lines and in all the energy that follows. That's the wonder of this collection: the "film of beauty, tides that keep on rising," as Drury writes. Sea Level Rising is an amazing achievement. It should not be missed. -Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades HurtJohn Philip Drury is a Marylander; it makes all the difference. The ever-changing sea defines these poems; Drury explores impermanence-destiny, the future, love, fame, desire-anchored by a rock-solid formal mastery. Land and sea interpenetrate here-loom up, fall away-transmuting one into the other, a way of seeing. His favorite city is Venice, a perfect metaphor for a sensibility too large to be only one thing or its opposite. The masks and play of that ancient meeting place of land, sky and sea divert us from the serious business of its survival-and that might be a good way to describe Drury's art. In impermanence, through our art, we survive. -James Cummins, author of Still Some CakeABOUT THE AUTHOR:John Philip Drury is the author of three previous books of poetry: The Refugee Camp (Turning Point Books, 2011), Burning the Aspern Papers (Miami University Press, 2003), and The Disappearing Town (Miami University Press, 2000). He has also written The Poetry Dictionary and Creating Poetry, both published by Writer's Digest Books. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, two Ohio Arts Council grants, an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. He is a Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati.