| Author/Contributor(s): | Wenderoth, Joe |
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Date: | 03/17/2000 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
In the epigraph to Joe Wenderoth's new volume of poetry, a herdsman, exhorted by Oedipus to speak the truth, replies It is if I speak that I will be destroyed.
Wenderoth's poetry is sparse, nihilistic -- and sometimes witty. Publishers Weekly wrote that, Like Stevens, Wenderoth has a passion for philosophical ideas; at the same time he follows Williams' dictum: no ideas but in things. The result is poetry that is intellectually charged but whose final fidelity is to the senses. His new book has the dignity of a sincere and ferocious despair. In the narratives of these poems, owing is all that really happens, and lives are shaped by the refusal to sink dumbly into tolerance of a spectacle.