Robert McDowell

Description:

A book-length poem that brilliantly reinvents narrative poetry, The Diviners is a single poem divided into five chapters, each a different decade. McDowell relates the most crucial developments in each decade spanning from the 1950s through 1990s, of the shared lives of Al, Eleanor, and their son, Tom. The Diviners records in blank verse the family’s beginnings, their growth, their problems, their separation, and their ultimate reunion. The events that follow the intertwined lives of the characters illustrate the endless capacity for human empathy.

Description:

Robert McDowell is a genuine poetic innovator, and Quiet Money is his first collection. Rezoning an honored old form—narrative verse—McDowell’s poems read almost like short stories, yet there is nothing prose like about his manner of expression. Here you will find careful craft and the presence of what Pound called “luminous detail.” In the long title poem, “Quiet Money,” a man flies solo across the Atlantic before Lindbergh, but can’t crow about it because he was merely a flying bootlegger picking up gin in Norway. Full of humor and desperation, these are poems from the middle-class world. “The Liberated Bowler” tells of a woman who can’t find a man able to cope with her talent. There is even a wicket parody of Robert Service, the man who gave narrative poetry such a bad name. As the poet Mark Jarman has written, “With Quiet Money Robert McDowell joins the big three of American narrative poetry—Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers. His is an important contribution, not only to poetry but to fiction as well.”

Description:

This first collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New
Narrative/New Formalist revival explores the relationship between poetry
and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson
Jeffers, and poetry by contemporaries such as Donald Justice and Jorie Graham.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The religious poem of a believer has a quality of conviction that still resonates with
extraordinary power, especially when one considers the poet has taken to witness,
in effect, in a poetic mode that has passed out of fashion.” Those who consider the
bucking of such trends to be The Secret of Poetry will find Mark Jarman’s essays
and reviews of value. Jarman, who took up the fate of religious verse poetically in
Questions for Ecclesiastes and Unholy Sonnets, here collects his prose statements on
the matter and other poetic questions, along with his assessments of contemporaries
like Jorie Graham, Andrew Hudgins, David Lehman and Alice Fulton, and of
canonical and near-canonical figures from a multitude of eras.”
—Publishers Weekly