Pennsylvania Collection Agency

by Michael Burkard

Poetry. The "lost book." "PENNSYLVANIA COLLECTION AGENCY, the ninth book from Michael Burkard, is comprised of poems written in 1986 but withheld from publication until now. This volume utilizes the unifying structure of a single year in the poetYs life as an organizing principle. Burkard has been quietly accumulating one of the most fascinating verse biographies we have, and in this book we visit old territories in unexpectedly candid poems about alcoholism, beauty, and the poet's childhood. Burkard further emblazons the arc of theme and language that is beginning to coalesce into one of the most distinguishable formal and emotional landscapes in contemporary poetry" --David Dodd Lee.

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

He graduated from Hobart College and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College (1975–78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983–84, 1986–87), and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). During the 1990s he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,The Paris Review, Ploughshares, APR, Ironwood, and Quarterly West.

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Burkard writes poems which often feel to me like those early drawings by Seurat in which everything is black, shadow defining shadow. This book of poems written in the mid-eighties was not published until 2001. He talks about his relationship to the poems in an afterword and relates that many of the poems were written while in motion. This makes sense since the poems often feel like glimpses from the windows of a moving vehicle. The people in his life are blurs. People blur into other people. Perception blurs into feeling and feeling blurs into rationalization and then back to feeling. The grass is blowing, so why shouldn't words?

"The rain falls making the leaves such dead things
the mind turns away. Fortunately for the leaves
they do not depend upon the mind."

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read this more recent offering by Burkard and find it deeply moving. Please see my review of his classic Ruby for Grief.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the first few poems I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. There isn't the sharpness to the image like in Ruby for Grief. But then I started to notice a much stronger relationship to the images being used, and then I felt Burkard opening those images so that he gave the reader greater accessibility to their meaning. And, at last, the slow unfolding of all this family drama over the course of the whole book.