| Author/Contributor(s): | Kampa, Stephen |
| Publisher: | Ohio University Press |
| Date: | 05/11/2011 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
Stephen Kampa's poems are witty and restless in their pursuit of an intelligent modern faith. They range from a four-line satire of office inspirational posters to a lengthy meditation on the silence of God. The poems also revel in the prosodic possibilities of English'shigh and low registers: a twenty-one line homageto Lord Byron that turns on three rhymes (one of which is "eisegesis"); a sestina whose end words include "sentimental," "Marseilles," and "Martian;" sapphics on the death of Ray Charles; and intricately modulated stanzas on the 1931 Spanish-language movie version of Dracula.
Despite the metaphysical seriousness, there is alwaysan undercurrent of stylistic levity -- a panoply of puns, comic rhymes, and loving misquotations of canonical literature -- that suggests comedy and tragedy are inextricably bound in human experience.