Blind Rain: Poems

by Bruce Bond

In his newest collection, Blind Rain, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.Bond opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which consoles paradoxically, since it is a form of loss itself. The work includes a long meditation, "The Return," that hinges on the double sense of the word "true" as suggesting both "the real" and "the loyal," and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a postmodern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the world at hand. From "Wake"One day now since my father last tried to speak,since the outer provinces of his body shutdown like small cities when the power goes,just the enormity of starlight to guide themon their cold journey into dawn. I am writingat the edge of the other half of life, the partwithout my father in it; I feel the strangesure pull of the earth I walk here,the polish of the grass, the distance between meand my students who look up and waitfor my first questions, knowing so littleof my life, just as I know so little of theirs,only a poem at a time to hold us togetherlike children before a fire in the woods.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Bruce Bond is the author of eight previous books of poetry including, most recently, Choir of the Wells (Etruscan Press, 2012), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (Finalist, The Poets Prize; LSU, 2008).

After receiving degrees in English from Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School, Bruce Bond earned his MA in Music Performance from Lamont School of Music. For several years then he worked as a classical and jazz musician in Colorado, after which he went on to receive his PhD in English from the University of Denver. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Raritan, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly, Poetry, and many other journals, and he has received numerous honors including fellowships from the NEA, Texas Commission on the Arts, The Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, and other organizations. Presently he is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bond addresses the weighty matters of death and the difficulty of choosing life, music and religion with much beauty. He writes particularly well about music and musicians (Bond is a jazz & classical guitarist), and he writes particularly well in more traditional form; e.g., in rhymed couplets and rhymed quatrains. Bond repeats words and images throughout to subtly and successfully tie poems together, thereby creating cohesive parts within the volume. One of my favorite lines, from "Flag": "how brief a life,/how long the hours." Nothing could be truer.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many beautiful poems. Bond writes best on themes of music and spirituality/faith.

[Kristīne · Rating 2 out of 5]

The poems were beautiful, yet failed to evoke any emotions in me.