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Signs & Wonders (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) Hardcover – April 4, 2011
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Winner of the CNY Book Award in Poetry of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse
Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB);
Wonders (as in "with furrowed brows"), a verb.
The couplet that leads into Charles Martin's fifth collection of richly inventive poems suggests that the world is to be read into and wondered over. The signs in this new work from the prize-winning American poet of formal brilliance and darkly comic sensibility are as stark as the one on a cage at the zoo that says ENDANGERED SPECIES, as surprising as those that announce the return of irony, and as enigmatic as a single word carved on a tombstone. Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.
- Print length96 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherJohns Hopkins University Press
- Publication dateApril 4, 2011
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-109780801899744
- ISBN-13978-0801899744
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Editorial Reviews
Review
―Maryann Corbett, Contemporary Poetry Review
If you need to be reminded, or to discover, why Martin is considered a master, pick up your own copy of Signs & Wonders.
―Alexander Pepple, Think Journal
As Signs & Wonders demonstrates so triumphantly, you'd have a hard time to find better contemporary poems than Charles Martin's. I can only be grateful for 'Ovid to His Book,' 'Support,' 'Poem for the Millennium,' 'Near Jeffrey's Hook,' 'After 9/11,' 'Poison,' and many more. Martin does not merely write well-made, shapely poems; he charges them with energy. I'm placing my bet that they will last.
―X. J. Kennedy
Charles Martin's new book, Signs & Wonders, is elegant and powerful. Past and present commingle as he writes poems of contemporary life in traditional form, and with a remarkable range: 'Poem for the Millennium' in accentual verse, and one of the best 9/11 poems we have in terza rima. Taking his cue from Catullus and Ovid, whose work he has brilliantly translated, Martin creates his own new vision of the world in language of praise with an underlying tone of combined horror and awe.
―Grace Schulman
Like an expert cellist in full control of phrasing and intonation, he can make a line of metrical verse sonorous or playful, tenebrous or scintillating, elegiac or mercurial.
―David Yezzi
Charles Martin is a poet of dazzling formal dexterity. Deep realizations flow through his fluent lines and stanzas, in which our present condition is clarified by allusions to our past. A poem on a computer virus at the Millennium invokes earlier monstrous invasions in the alliterative meter of Beowulf, the horror of 9/11 is summoned by tercets as in The Inferno. The clarity, the precision of Martin's language makes his poems accessible and memorable. This is the work of a master.
―Daniel Hoffman
Review
Charles Martin is a poet of dazzling formal dexterity. Deep realizations flow through his fluent lines and stanzas, in which our present condition is clarified by allusions to our past. A poem on a computer virus at the Millennium invokes earlier monstrous invasions in the alliterative meter of Beowulf, the horror of 9/11 is summoned by tercets as in The Inferno. The clarity, the precision of Martin's language makes his poems accessible and memorable. This is the work of a master.
-- Daniel HoffmanAbout the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0801899745
- Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press; 1st edition (April 4, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 96 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780801899744
- ISBN-13 : 978-0801899744
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,864,941 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42,366 in American Poetry (Books)
- #72,088 in Encyclopedias & Subject Guides
- Customer Reviews:
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My first impression was how varied the poems are-some are short, almost just an observation rather than a poem. Others have a limerick quality, while a few extend to pages of rhymed couplets. For some reason, I was predisposed to think of this as "serious" poetry, but in fact, I giggled uncontrollably at a few of them ("The Spaniard", for one).
His topics also vary, and yet the whole remains cohesive. One example is "Brooklyn in the Seventies", where at first it appears he's waxing nostalgic about thriving real estate and restoring brownstones, and then it pivots to discuss the variations in marriage-the times of tearing down and renewal. The parallels are uncanny and truly lead you to wonder:
Yes, selves were in a frenzy of commotion,
And those beyond their expiration dates
Were being tossed despite years of devotion
So whether by one's doing or by fate's
One found oneself in an unlikely place...
My favorite is "Ovid to His Book", in which the ancient poet imagines sending to one of his books Rome to somehow regain his entry to the city from which he's exiled. In the poem he counsels the tangible book as to proper decorum and strategy:
Go on your way now, book, and speak for me
In places that I love, but cannot be,
Saluting those whom I have come to meet
On metrical, if on no other, feet...
When biting words offend you, just recall
The best defense is often none at all,
And if you'd really have my exile end,
Go find us both an influential friend...
"After 9/11" is likely to be the most moving of the poetry in the book, as Martin relays the emotions and actions of New Yorkers at the moment of the tragedy and in the aftermath, searching for loved ones. Yet he goes in a different direction, noting that at one time, Manhattan was the site of a battle of George Washington, and that buried bones are not uncommon. Rather, they form the foundation of the island historically and culturally, and create "a sublime alignment of the present with the past."
Against the need to hold them all in thought,
Time is what places them beyond recall,
Against the need of the falling to be caught,
Against the woman who's begun to fall,
Against the woman who is watching from below,
Time is the photo peeling from the wall.
In total, Martin covers a dramatic amount of subjects: George W. Bush, art, the "unreal" pain of a poet, endangered animals, and suicide. In doing so, he makes thematic comparisons that are never cliché or trite. Only one title, "Poem for the Millennium," left me lost-I didn't know what to make of the style and phrasing that was evoking the events of the year 2000.