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Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews
This posthumous volume brings together the poems of Tom Andrews, whose untimely death in 2001 cut off a career marked by early achievement and remarkable innovation. It comprises two previously published books, The Brother’s Country and The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, and two unpublished manuscript, closing with two late uncollected poems.
- GenresPoetry
276 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
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January 9, 2025
A poem by Mary Peelen made me think of Tom Andrews today -- and pull out this extraordinary but sadly posthumous Collected. I miss the poems Tom would have written had he lived. Here is a review I did of this some 15 years ago, where I thought of it primarily in terms of the poetic sequences he wrote:
Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 2002. Pp. 265. $22.95.
We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90. By Jana Harris. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2003. Pp. 112. $14.95.
Transplant. By Macklin Smith. Ann Arbor: Shaman Drum Books, 2003. Pp. 121. $14.95.
In The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, by M. L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall, first published in 1983, the authors make a strong argument that the poetic sequence is "actually the modern poetic form within which all the tendencies of more than a century of experiment define themselves and find their aesthetic purpose." They give a lovely description of how a poem works—and are so pleased by it that they emphasize it with italics—and then place this form within their definition:
A poem depends for its life neither on continuous narration nor on developed argument but on a progression of specific qualities and intensities of emotionally and sensuously charged awareness. A successful long poem, and the modern sequence pre-eminently, is made up of such centers of intensity. Its structure resides in the felt relationships among them.
Whether or not one accepts the definition by Rosenthal and Gall, their impressive volume succeeds in convincing its readers of the central position of the poetic sequence in modern and contemporary poetry. I am, however, tempted to simplify their definition and make it more colloquial: a poetic sequence is a whole that, however beautiful its parts, becomes something greater because of the connections, either explicit and logical or resonant and psychological, between its sections.
Rosenthal's and Gall's contention about the importance of the form has been borne out by much of the work done in the twenty years since they published their book. Self-concious and self-labeled poetic sequences appear regularly, and there seem to be a growing number of prizes given specifically for this form. Often books that appear as collections of thematically but loosely linked poems become much more interesting when read as sequences.
As Random Symmetries, his posthumous Collected, clearly shows, Tom Andrews, who died at the age of 41 in 2001, wrote sequences throughout his life, and finally used them to break out of genre categories entirely. The first poem in The Brother's Country, Andrews's first book and a selection in the National Poetry Series in 1989, is an elegy in nine parts for his brother. That book ends with "A Language of Hemophilia," a long sequence that combines overheard conversation, scientific literature, and flashes of his own experience as a patient suffering with this condition. It concludes with a kind of prayer—another form this God-haunted poet often used—offering tentative thankfulness for temporary healing:
Gratitude and
fear—Your relentless
rhythm—I move to
it still—How to
address with
care
whatever You are—
pooled
words, this
moment's cryo-
acquittal
The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle, Andrews's second book and the winner of the Iowa Prize in 1993, opens with its title poem, which is another prayer but this one having moments of genuine humor—obvious even in its title, first line, and form taken from Christopher Smart: "May the Lord Jesus Christ bless the hemophiliac's motorcycle, the smell of knobby tires. . . ." It is typical of Andrews's humor and a measure of his success that, while often very funny, the laughter is tied to serious themes. This second book ended with "Codeine Diary," a long sequence, mostly in prose. Andrews rewrote and significantly expanded that sequence as a memoir, also called Codeine Diary, that was published in 1998. That memoir is an illness narrative absolutely without self-pity. In it Andrews tells more fully the story of his brother, who died as a young man from a blood disease unrelated to hemophilia, but the poet puts this story in the narrative context of two funny and very ill brothers finding their own way to live in the world.
But it is in the two large projects Andrews was working on at the time of his death, two sections that make up more than half of Random Symmetries, where we get the clearest indication of where his work might have gone had this poet lived. "25 Short Films about Poetry," a sequence of prose poems, is often funny in its weird juxtapositions of high and low culture, but also ends up as a meditation on the possibilities of language. Just a few of the titles can give the flavor of the "films": "Jacques Derrida and God's Tsimtsum," "Joyce Kilmer, in Picardy, Worries About Plagiarism in 'Trees,'" or the wonderfully weird "William Makepeace Thackeray Follows his Bliss" ("Thackeray, possessor of one of the strangest middle names in history!").
The last section of Random Symmetries is the book-length sequence The Temptation of Saint Augustine. In the opening "Argument" Andrews describes his three-part form as a triptych and then defines those old altarpieces as "three separate but interpenetrating panels placed side by side, thus honoring and emulating the mystery of the Holy Trinity." There is something in that "separate but interpenetrating" that defines much of the work this poet had done with the poetic sequence.
But in The Temptation Andrews has exercised different ambitions. There is a narrative behind this poem that is very closely tied to Augustine's life. It grows from a moving moment in the Confessions when the future saint describes the time when he had to give up the unnamed woman who had lived with him for fifteen years and who was the mother of his son, Adeodatus. Andrews quotes Augustine: "My heart still clung to her: it was pierced and wounded within me." This is the story that the contemporary poet turned into Augustine's temptation. The "Left Panel," or first section and the closest one to verse, gives a fractured dialogue between the saint and his concubine that includes moments of domesticity and quick visions of the world around them. The "Central Panel," the most obviously narrative and the part that could easily be called imaginative biography, tells the story of the relationship, but also places it within Augustine's emotional and intellectual search for God. Some wonderful novelistic moments rise out of the sequence: "During the days the room was sunlit and airy, freshened by hyacinth and rosemary from a nearby garden. He loved to toss Adeodatus into the air, whispering Up Adeodatus, down Adeodatus!, the child squealing with wide delight." The "Right Panel" consists of unfinished letters Augustine may have tried to write to his abandoned lover telling her about the death of their child. At the very end of that section, and almost the end of this posthumous Collected Poems, the poet returns to verse to capture the despair of his saint and return to a theme that occupied him for much of his life—how does a poet find words to express ultimate longings:
O Lord
help me I cannot remember
your face or your face
is a high icon in a dusklit
chapel Forgive me I will never
tell you this you will never know
Adeodatus under the grass you are
as far away as the voice
I want to speak to you with
that voice is like nothing like nothing
on earth
At the end of this poem, the end of this Collected, and at the end of his writing life, Tom Andrews had moved past individual lyric, past the sequence and into a form that can only be called sui generis.
Jana Harris, too, has used the poetic sequence to create imaginative biographies, although her techniques are quite different. In 1993 she published Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? Voices of Pioneer Women. She has described the poems in that volume as "linked dramatic monologues" born out of archival research she did on the early settlers of the Okanogon Valley in central Washington State. The urgency of these poems is located in the simple fact that the history of poor people, particularly the history of poor women, is often overlooked before being lost entirely. That this fact is widely understood does nothing to alter the urgency of the writers and historians who stumble into interesting archival material.
In We Never Speak of It, Harris has moved inland, to the wild area on the Idaho/Wyoming border close to the Snake River, and she has altered her approach in interesting ways. Although still informed by historical research, here she has created a fictional place and fictional characters. Most of the poems are in the voice of a rural school teacher, Francis Stanton, or in the voices of her students and their parents. Many of the texts included have the feel of discovered letters or schoolroom essays, giving the poems the authority of what novelist Eileen Pollack, among others, has called "false documents," or documents that appear real to help with certain kinds of fictional situations.
Occasionally a poem in this volume will present itself as a letter. In "I Have Always Believed It Is Entirely Possible to Pray While Chopping Wood," Martha Jones, single mother of four children scraping out a life somehow on the high plains during a harsh winter, writes to the teacher: "I do not regret my decision and I am thankful to hear that all four of my children have stopped trembling like aspen when called upon to recite. I apologize for them having tried your patience. Some say life is patterned at birth and cannot be restitched. Coming into this country from Wales as a bride, I crossed Clear Creek with one horse that spooked, kicking the end-gate out of the wagon box. My trunk with every keepsake, bolt of cloth, photograph, lace, button, book I owned slid off the back, never heard of again." Even though this appears to be invented to fit into the sequence of poems in We Never Speak of It, it sounds like many letters I have seen in pioneer archives, where so much is implied and complaints are seldom explicit. Of course in its place within Harris's book of poems, it collects a history, a place, and a situation around it, making it something more than a found document, whether "false" or "real."
At other times in the book and particularly in the voice of her school mistress, Harris allows herself more traditional poetic flourishes. In "The Inclement Weather of the Heart," short free verse lines are linked with internal rhymes and strong assonance that accent the images the school teacher uses to lament the lover she has lost or never had:
Standing river edge, barefoot
on duck egg stones, this
my secret place.
I study the cool white
light of mirrored stars
floating in night ink
and drink the thin
blue milk of your face.
If only the bright
kerosene lanterns
of my insomnia
could fuel my days where
the anchor of your smile
has let me drift into the Snake's
violent water.
The heightened language of the verse assumes a quieter role in its larger context. The resonance between the poems allows the reader to easily construct a narrative uniting them, until Harris's book becomes a unified whole, a sequence that becomes a passionate story about characters too often overlooked in our continental drama.
Macklin Smith's first book of poetry, Transplant, may be the clearest example in this group of the emotional power a well-constructed sequence can create. Like some of Tom Andrews's work, it is an illness narrative: in this case, it recounts the poet's diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from leukemia. Like Harris's books it tells a story and creates characters: the poet himself, certainly, but also his wife, friends, and some of the medical staff who attend to him. The speaker of these poems is clearly understood to be the poet: many of these poems assert their truth with the authority of intimacy. They have the power of the best reportage—"I was there. I am the man," is what they seem to say.
Despite the subject matter of Transplant, or maybe because of it, there is an exuberant formal playfulness in this collection. Smith has included sonnets, villanelles, syllabic poems, found poems, prose poems, poems with two-, three-, or four-line stanzas, regular iambic rhythms, and long Whitmanian lines that circle back to a repeated first word. He has a couple of witty post-modernist exercises where a four-line poem might have six footnotes which run for a couple of pages and seems much more influenced by David Foster Wallace or Nicholson Baker than by any obvious poetic model.
In addition to the illness narrative that builds through the sequence of this extraordinary prosodic display, Smith writes many poems about birds, and his memories of them provide a visual contrast to the medical environment where much of the sequence takes place. Smith calls himself an "obsessive birder" in one poem, and in another prose piece admits, "Not to brag, but I have listed more species of birds in North America than anyone else: 856. Pride, it seems, is the birders' sin, or Gluttony, or Envy." Here is a lovely sequence of linked haiku—yet another form—about birds seen in Alaska:
Golden plovers! two
Flash through sun-filtering fog
Calling, veering north.
A White-tailed Sea Eagle
Glides
With torn meat of salmon.
The Lapland Longspur males
Arc high over nesting females' eggs, then
Wings spread, singing, float down.
But as nice as that is, it is atypical. Many of these poems deal directly with medical conditions, and they do not allow the reader to flinch. For instance, after the successful bone marrow transplant, Smith writes in "Discharged": "Since I had a lingering infection in my leg I got instructions / In how to flush and clean the various connections / For my home IV." We learn the mechanics of medical treatment in poems with titles like "Leukemia," "Donor Search," "The Hickman Catheter," "Busulfan" ("An oral chemotherapy / To soften up the marrow"), and the surprisingly funny "Walking Around with Tubes and Bottles." The information and the personality develop slowly through the sequence, each poem altering what comes after in interesting ways.
After the transplant and the arduous recovery, Smith establishes contact with the generous man who donated the bone marrow that matched his own, and he includes some of the letters he wrote and received. Near the end of the book he puts in an unedited copy of the donor's family Christmas letter, and what might otherwise seem bland and ordinary is made luminous by its position in the sequence. Among paragraphs in "The Martin Family" that detail vacations, National Guard service, and the birth of a child, appears this paragraph, almost as an afterthought: "In August I received a letter from my bone marrow donee, he is an English professor at the University of Michigan. He recently went to Alaska on a bird watching trip which included hiking and bike riding. The feeling of knowing this man is active again because of me is incredible. I still say it hurt like hell, but it was definitely worth it knowing that he is back to work and enjoying life again." There is nothing flashy or crafted in the language, but by its place in the sequence the paragraph becomes one of the "centers of intensity" Rosenthal and Gall identified as an essential element of the modern poetic sequence. Found or discovered or carefully worked into place, the donor's letter becomes a moving poem within a poem because of its relationship to all the poems that have come before it.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 2002. Pp. 265. $22.95.
We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90. By Jana Harris. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2003. Pp. 112. $14.95.
Transplant. By Macklin Smith. Ann Arbor: Shaman Drum Books, 2003. Pp. 121. $14.95.
In The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, by M. L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall, first published in 1983, the authors make a strong argument that the poetic sequence is "actually the modern poetic form within which all the tendencies of more than a century of experiment define themselves and find their aesthetic purpose." They give a lovely description of how a poem works—and are so pleased by it that they emphasize it with italics—and then place this form within their definition:
A poem depends for its life neither on continuous narration nor on developed argument but on a progression of specific qualities and intensities of emotionally and sensuously charged awareness. A successful long poem, and the modern sequence pre-eminently, is made up of such centers of intensity. Its structure resides in the felt relationships among them.
Whether or not one accepts the definition by Rosenthal and Gall, their impressive volume succeeds in convincing its readers of the central position of the poetic sequence in modern and contemporary poetry. I am, however, tempted to simplify their definition and make it more colloquial: a poetic sequence is a whole that, however beautiful its parts, becomes something greater because of the connections, either explicit and logical or resonant and psychological, between its sections.
Rosenthal's and Gall's contention about the importance of the form has been borne out by much of the work done in the twenty years since they published their book. Self-concious and self-labeled poetic sequences appear regularly, and there seem to be a growing number of prizes given specifically for this form. Often books that appear as collections of thematically but loosely linked poems become much more interesting when read as sequences.
As Random Symmetries, his posthumous Collected, clearly shows, Tom Andrews, who died at the age of 41 in 2001, wrote sequences throughout his life, and finally used them to break out of genre categories entirely. The first poem in The Brother's Country, Andrews's first book and a selection in the National Poetry Series in 1989, is an elegy in nine parts for his brother. That book ends with "A Language of Hemophilia," a long sequence that combines overheard conversation, scientific literature, and flashes of his own experience as a patient suffering with this condition. It concludes with a kind of prayer—another form this God-haunted poet often used—offering tentative thankfulness for temporary healing:
Gratitude and
fear—Your relentless
rhythm—I move to
it still—How to
address with
care
whatever You are—
pooled
words, this
moment's cryo-
acquittal
The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle, Andrews's second book and the winner of the Iowa Prize in 1993, opens with its title poem, which is another prayer but this one having moments of genuine humor—obvious even in its title, first line, and form taken from Christopher Smart: "May the Lord Jesus Christ bless the hemophiliac's motorcycle, the smell of knobby tires. . . ." It is typical of Andrews's humor and a measure of his success that, while often very funny, the laughter is tied to serious themes. This second book ended with "Codeine Diary," a long sequence, mostly in prose. Andrews rewrote and significantly expanded that sequence as a memoir, also called Codeine Diary, that was published in 1998. That memoir is an illness narrative absolutely without self-pity. In it Andrews tells more fully the story of his brother, who died as a young man from a blood disease unrelated to hemophilia, but the poet puts this story in the narrative context of two funny and very ill brothers finding their own way to live in the world.
But it is in the two large projects Andrews was working on at the time of his death, two sections that make up more than half of Random Symmetries, where we get the clearest indication of where his work might have gone had this poet lived. "25 Short Films about Poetry," a sequence of prose poems, is often funny in its weird juxtapositions of high and low culture, but also ends up as a meditation on the possibilities of language. Just a few of the titles can give the flavor of the "films": "Jacques Derrida and God's Tsimtsum," "Joyce Kilmer, in Picardy, Worries About Plagiarism in 'Trees,'" or the wonderfully weird "William Makepeace Thackeray Follows his Bliss" ("Thackeray, possessor of one of the strangest middle names in history!").
The last section of Random Symmetries is the book-length sequence The Temptation of Saint Augustine. In the opening "Argument" Andrews describes his three-part form as a triptych and then defines those old altarpieces as "three separate but interpenetrating panels placed side by side, thus honoring and emulating the mystery of the Holy Trinity." There is something in that "separate but interpenetrating" that defines much of the work this poet had done with the poetic sequence.
But in The Temptation Andrews has exercised different ambitions. There is a narrative behind this poem that is very closely tied to Augustine's life. It grows from a moving moment in the Confessions when the future saint describes the time when he had to give up the unnamed woman who had lived with him for fifteen years and who was the mother of his son, Adeodatus. Andrews quotes Augustine: "My heart still clung to her: it was pierced and wounded within me." This is the story that the contemporary poet turned into Augustine's temptation. The "Left Panel," or first section and the closest one to verse, gives a fractured dialogue between the saint and his concubine that includes moments of domesticity and quick visions of the world around them. The "Central Panel," the most obviously narrative and the part that could easily be called imaginative biography, tells the story of the relationship, but also places it within Augustine's emotional and intellectual search for God. Some wonderful novelistic moments rise out of the sequence: "During the days the room was sunlit and airy, freshened by hyacinth and rosemary from a nearby garden. He loved to toss Adeodatus into the air, whispering Up Adeodatus, down Adeodatus!, the child squealing with wide delight." The "Right Panel" consists of unfinished letters Augustine may have tried to write to his abandoned lover telling her about the death of their child. At the very end of that section, and almost the end of this posthumous Collected Poems, the poet returns to verse to capture the despair of his saint and return to a theme that occupied him for much of his life—how does a poet find words to express ultimate longings:
O Lord
help me I cannot remember
your face or your face
is a high icon in a dusklit
chapel Forgive me I will never
tell you this you will never know
Adeodatus under the grass you are
as far away as the voice
I want to speak to you with
that voice is like nothing like nothing
on earth
At the end of this poem, the end of this Collected, and at the end of his writing life, Tom Andrews had moved past individual lyric, past the sequence and into a form that can only be called sui generis.
Jana Harris, too, has used the poetic sequence to create imaginative biographies, although her techniques are quite different. In 1993 she published Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? Voices of Pioneer Women. She has described the poems in that volume as "linked dramatic monologues" born out of archival research she did on the early settlers of the Okanogon Valley in central Washington State. The urgency of these poems is located in the simple fact that the history of poor people, particularly the history of poor women, is often overlooked before being lost entirely. That this fact is widely understood does nothing to alter the urgency of the writers and historians who stumble into interesting archival material.
In We Never Speak of It, Harris has moved inland, to the wild area on the Idaho/Wyoming border close to the Snake River, and she has altered her approach in interesting ways. Although still informed by historical research, here she has created a fictional place and fictional characters. Most of the poems are in the voice of a rural school teacher, Francis Stanton, or in the voices of her students and their parents. Many of the texts included have the feel of discovered letters or schoolroom essays, giving the poems the authority of what novelist Eileen Pollack, among others, has called "false documents," or documents that appear real to help with certain kinds of fictional situations.
Occasionally a poem in this volume will present itself as a letter. In "I Have Always Believed It Is Entirely Possible to Pray While Chopping Wood," Martha Jones, single mother of four children scraping out a life somehow on the high plains during a harsh winter, writes to the teacher: "I do not regret my decision and I am thankful to hear that all four of my children have stopped trembling like aspen when called upon to recite. I apologize for them having tried your patience. Some say life is patterned at birth and cannot be restitched. Coming into this country from Wales as a bride, I crossed Clear Creek with one horse that spooked, kicking the end-gate out of the wagon box. My trunk with every keepsake, bolt of cloth, photograph, lace, button, book I owned slid off the back, never heard of again." Even though this appears to be invented to fit into the sequence of poems in We Never Speak of It, it sounds like many letters I have seen in pioneer archives, where so much is implied and complaints are seldom explicit. Of course in its place within Harris's book of poems, it collects a history, a place, and a situation around it, making it something more than a found document, whether "false" or "real."
At other times in the book and particularly in the voice of her school mistress, Harris allows herself more traditional poetic flourishes. In "The Inclement Weather of the Heart," short free verse lines are linked with internal rhymes and strong assonance that accent the images the school teacher uses to lament the lover she has lost or never had:
Standing river edge, barefoot
on duck egg stones, this
my secret place.
I study the cool white
light of mirrored stars
floating in night ink
and drink the thin
blue milk of your face.
If only the bright
kerosene lanterns
of my insomnia
could fuel my days where
the anchor of your smile
has let me drift into the Snake's
violent water.
The heightened language of the verse assumes a quieter role in its larger context. The resonance between the poems allows the reader to easily construct a narrative uniting them, until Harris's book becomes a unified whole, a sequence that becomes a passionate story about characters too often overlooked in our continental drama.
Macklin Smith's first book of poetry, Transplant, may be the clearest example in this group of the emotional power a well-constructed sequence can create. Like some of Tom Andrews's work, it is an illness narrative: in this case, it recounts the poet's diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from leukemia. Like Harris's books it tells a story and creates characters: the poet himself, certainly, but also his wife, friends, and some of the medical staff who attend to him. The speaker of these poems is clearly understood to be the poet: many of these poems assert their truth with the authority of intimacy. They have the power of the best reportage—"I was there. I am the man," is what they seem to say.
Despite the subject matter of Transplant, or maybe because of it, there is an exuberant formal playfulness in this collection. Smith has included sonnets, villanelles, syllabic poems, found poems, prose poems, poems with two-, three-, or four-line stanzas, regular iambic rhythms, and long Whitmanian lines that circle back to a repeated first word. He has a couple of witty post-modernist exercises where a four-line poem might have six footnotes which run for a couple of pages and seems much more influenced by David Foster Wallace or Nicholson Baker than by any obvious poetic model.
In addition to the illness narrative that builds through the sequence of this extraordinary prosodic display, Smith writes many poems about birds, and his memories of them provide a visual contrast to the medical environment where much of the sequence takes place. Smith calls himself an "obsessive birder" in one poem, and in another prose piece admits, "Not to brag, but I have listed more species of birds in North America than anyone else: 856. Pride, it seems, is the birders' sin, or Gluttony, or Envy." Here is a lovely sequence of linked haiku—yet another form—about birds seen in Alaska:
Golden plovers! two
Flash through sun-filtering fog
Calling, veering north.
A White-tailed Sea Eagle
Glides
With torn meat of salmon.
The Lapland Longspur males
Arc high over nesting females' eggs, then
Wings spread, singing, float down.
But as nice as that is, it is atypical. Many of these poems deal directly with medical conditions, and they do not allow the reader to flinch. For instance, after the successful bone marrow transplant, Smith writes in "Discharged": "Since I had a lingering infection in my leg I got instructions / In how to flush and clean the various connections / For my home IV." We learn the mechanics of medical treatment in poems with titles like "Leukemia," "Donor Search," "The Hickman Catheter," "Busulfan" ("An oral chemotherapy / To soften up the marrow"), and the surprisingly funny "Walking Around with Tubes and Bottles." The information and the personality develop slowly through the sequence, each poem altering what comes after in interesting ways.
After the transplant and the arduous recovery, Smith establishes contact with the generous man who donated the bone marrow that matched his own, and he includes some of the letters he wrote and received. Near the end of the book he puts in an unedited copy of the donor's family Christmas letter, and what might otherwise seem bland and ordinary is made luminous by its position in the sequence. Among paragraphs in "The Martin Family" that detail vacations, National Guard service, and the birth of a child, appears this paragraph, almost as an afterthought: "In August I received a letter from my bone marrow donee, he is an English professor at the University of Michigan. He recently went to Alaska on a bird watching trip which included hiking and bike riding. The feeling of knowing this man is active again because of me is incredible. I still say it hurt like hell, but it was definitely worth it knowing that he is back to work and enjoying life again." There is nothing flashy or crafted in the language, but by its place in the sequence the paragraph becomes one of the "centers of intensity" Rosenthal and Gall identified as an essential element of the modern poetic sequence. Found or discovered or carefully worked into place, the donor's letter becomes a moving poem within a poem because of its relationship to all the poems that have come before it.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
Want to read
November 6, 2012Bought this for the book-length unpublished poem on St Augustine, which I saw excerpted elsewhere online: http://vdbarrett.iweb.bsu.edu/staugus... Not really interested in anything else (heh, sorry, Tom), altho I do think I have Hemophiliac's Motorcycle somewhere. I know I do have Codeine Diary.
April 18, 2023
This was a really interesting collection of poems that I stumbled across by chance. I was reading Anthony Doerr's memoir, "Four Seasons in Rome," and he briefly quotes one of Andrews's poems. I found that poem ("Ars Poetica") , used it in a lesson on Ars Poeticas (I'm a high school ELA teacher), and then looked for more of his work. I found out that he died tragically young, over 20 years ago, and his published work is very limited. I'm grateful for this collection because he died right before the internet really exploded and his career would have had no problem being preserved. Unfortunately, this is one of the only anthologies that we have of his work and the internet has next to nothing on him. This anthology is not perfect, and he demands a lot of his readers (get ready to google ancient philosophers and look up obscure references), and some of the material is just plain weird and hard to push through, but I'm glad I looked further into the quote from Doerr's book and found this collection.
August 24, 2019
Most of the work is free verse and prose poems, a form in which the many details from the illnesses of the poet and his brother become tedious but the imagined account of Augustine's relationship with his unnamed concubine shines.
July 22, 2018
This book contains my favorite poem "When Comfort Arrives."
October 11, 2019
Tom Andrews was a major poetic talent gone far too soon. Tom Andrews has had an enormous influence on my writing.
September 22, 2022
ok i didnt technically finish it but feels close enough and also one day i will and also reading a whole collected is a lot even tho i guess this one wasn’t that long
January 18, 2008
Incredible. Sometimes random lines from this book will just appear in my head there so good.
March 14, 2011
when I'm pushed to read poetry I generally love it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews