Additional information
by Frank X. Gaspar (Author)
In these poems, the poet restlessly inhabits the night, finding it terrifying and beautiful, searching for meaning in the yard, the neighborhood, the heavens and every wise book he owns. These urban pastoral meditations employ ritual and repetition to create a kind of mantra, seeking surrender to that state of meditation leading to enlightenment-yet arguing with the idea of surrendering any attachments at all to this world we've been given to learn and love: a city garden cohabitated by ancient Romans and tattooed kids, automobiles and hollyhock, maurauding cats and the Buddha. "I should be satisfied with the household gods," he mourns, but is satisfied with nothing, determined to fit the whole world into his poems lest the one essential thing slip by.
"Frank Gaspar's poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing. In them, he is speaking to the reader-but also to himself, or perhaps to some hazy divinity or to the blue sky. I felt in his voice no attempt to persuade me of anything. I felt only the abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about."
-Mary Oliver
Author Biography
Frank X. Gaspar is the author of three previous prize-winning collections of poetry, The Holyoke, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, and A Field Guide to the Heavens (winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry), and a novel, Leaving Pico, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the California Book Award for First Fiction. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 1996 and 2000, among others. His many honors and awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Edgar Stanley Award and a Readers' Choice Award (both from Prairie Schooner). Born in Provincetown, MA, he now lives in southern California where he teaches at Long Beach City College.
