At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering Of Poems

by Thomas Meyer

This is a collection of Thomas Meyer's poetry over the last 25 years. It brings together already published work, and new, unpublished.

Genres: Poetry

257 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1999

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1966 a Bard undergraduate, Thomas Meyer, wrote an ebulliently clever knock-off of Jack Spicer called The Bang Book, published in 1971 by Jonathan Williams' The Jargon Society. Williams' Jargon Society had been bringing out important work by neglected modernists like Lorine Niedecker and Mina Loy since its founding in the back yard of Williams' alma mater, Black Mountain College, where he had studied with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Franz Kline and others. Williams and Meyer became lovers, as well, and thereafter brought out subsequent editions of Meyer's poems, while remaining largely outside poetry scenes in the Scaly Mountains of North Carolina.

In 1999 Jargon brought out this book, Meyer's collected poems of twenty-five years, At Dusk Iridescent . Collecting work from eleven other publications, it is a magnificent volume to hold, and to read. The poems begin in a classicism with regard to epigrammatic tact and an abundance of medial caesura; they show the influence of Stefan George, then again Bunting and Stein. The formalism in Meyer's mid-thirties (essentially the Eighties) gives way especially to the sonnet's versatility in handling sexual and romantic material and are Meyer's way toward a mid-course self-examination and return to classical spiritual texts. New work, elegaic in kind (Williams died in 2008), in a recent Jacket, continues the return to epigrammatic modes and suggests that At Dusk Iridescent ought to be revised and expanded.