Across the Layers: Poems Old and New

by Albert Goldbarth

When Albert Goldbarth's Heaven and A Cosmology received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, the citation called it "a dazzling, delirious book as full of zest and joy as it is prodigal in the sweep of its learning and the warmth of its Goldbarth is manna in the desert, a cure for what ails our poetry". Now Goldbarth offers Across the Poems Old and New , which allows the poet to reconsider recent and previously published work in a continuum of wide stylistic variety and yet deep unifying concerns.

The collection opens with his book-length "novel-poem" Different Fleshes , a serious romp through smalltown Texas and gay Paree in the twenties, and closes with the "essay-poem" "Dual", a study of both intimate filial affections and the risk-taking photographs of Diane Arbus. Between these two major works are poems that range from a twelve-line lyric meditation on loss and continuity to a thirty-four-page narrative adventure of life on the road with a band of antique radio collectors; from poems in autobiographical voice to a chorale spoken by Walt Whitman's imagined children; from the world of Miss Aluminum Siding to the rigorous vision of Georgia O'Keeffe; from an antic litany of comic-book superheroes to a dark look at government espionage on the homefront.

Connecting and further vivifying this surface expanse are shared explorations in the uses of memory, in the bittersweet sounding of elegy, and in patterns and balances on the cosmic scale as registered by small moments of pleasure and pain twinned in individual lives.

Genres: Poetry

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Albert Goldbarth is an American poet born January 31, 1948 in Chicago. He is known for his prolific production, his gregarious tone, his eclectic interests and his distinctive 'talky' style. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1991 and 2001, the only poet to receive the honor two times. He also won the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, in 2008.

Goldbarth received his BA from the University of Illinois in 1969 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1971. He is currently distinguished professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, and he teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Converse College.