Light Reading

by Stephan Delbos

Light Reading, the first full-length poetry collection from poet, playwright, translator and editor Stephan Delbos, ranges from micro-minimalist poems to all-encompassing lyric declarations and metatextual litanies. The book’s first section, “Light Reading,” begins with an aubade and ends with a lullaby. In between, these short poems grapple with the marks words make on existence, exploring themes of language and memory, and confronting the work of poets and thinkers including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, John Milton, Jack Kerouac, William Bronk and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second section of the book, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” includes an elegy for Czech playwright and President Václav Havel, and poems inspired by the composers Philip Glass, György Ligeti and Johnny Rotten, among others. These open-ended lyrical narratives playfully explode the minimalist complexity of “Light Reading.” The book’s third section, “Arrangements,” is a series of creative directives for poetry that takes metatext to the max. Light Reading exhibits a startling formal range and a delightful eclecticism of poetic thought.

101 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2018

About the author

Stephan Delbos is the Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared internationally. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). His play Chetty’s Lullaby, about the life of trumpet legend Chet Baker, was produced in San Francisco in 2014. His co-translation of The Absolute Gravedigger, by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation grant in 2015 and was published by Twisted Spoon Press. Deaf Empire, his play about Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, was produced by the Prague Shakespeare Company in 2017. He is the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2017), and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2018) and Small Talk (Literární salon, 2019). He is a founding editor of B O D Y.

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

The very spare, often insightful, frequently humourous poems employ few words and an expressive use of space, to offer much more than one might expect on first blush. These are poems that appear to come into being on the page. And, speaking of pages, this is a beautifully presented volume.

An expanded review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/05/10/op...

[Stephan Delbos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Light Reading interrupt silence with whispers, occasional shouts, erasures’ spaces. Delbos’ lines resonate with startling spontaneity and sprezzatura. A master minimalist, he writes with risible daring and poignance. His mind’s at poetic play throughout these refreshing poems, leaping with erudition, oneiric strangeness, and Czech allusions that would charm Kafka. “Your brain is a beehive” and “honey tastes like blood,” he writes in “Bagatelle for György Ligeti, Eternal Light & Honeycomb.” I love the buzz and blood of this book.

—Chard deNiord

Fragmentary, elliptical, and aphoristic, Stephan Delbos’ lyrics resonate beyond the page. As he notes, “language / outlives us.” If American poet Bill Knott whispers below these cool surfaces, so too do Celan and Ritsos, allowing Delbos the “Ghost notes” of his interior yet cosmopolitan voice. There’s warmth too (“here / hang / your / shells / shadows / shame”) and playfulness (“I carry music like Samson / in my beard and later / on my Samsung”). Light Reading, as the title suggests, is breezy and prophetic, mirror and depth, and pleasurably “drunk on wordscotch.”

—Michael Waters

Lorine Niedecker called her work a “condensery,” and the term is equally appropriate to the poetry of Stephan Delbos in his brilliant Light Reading. His minimalist pieces are charged with rare wit and intelligence, his bagatelles are as poised and surprising as those of Bartok, and his tongue-in-teach suggestions for his fellow poets turn out, ironically, to be wise advice despite themselves (“A poem controlled by someone else / A someone who doesn’t speak your language”). According to Delbos, “What is worth believing / is impossible / to believe / and really only / that will save you…” And you better believe it.

—Norman Finkelstein

This is a fascinating, disquieting book whose ghostly narratives emerge from tenuous connections between statements, between words, as well as between words and the page’s negative space. Ineluctably conditioned by the very writing of them, histories of walks along Prague streets, of places where the poet eats or drinks, have become forms of desire. Light Reading’s opening line, “what you cried when you came from the womb is your name,” reveals an intuition of experience that constitutes a radical departure from In Memory of Fire, the prior collection by Stephan Delbos. Midway through the new volume the equally laconic “Why Writing” makes this simple observation: “Even our names are words.” To be human is to be suffused by language. And to write is the most human act, which brings us to fullness. Naming allows us to belong, yet the poet, the artist, who makes marks in the world fashions our existential paradox; inscription throws the self into flux. Delbos has crafted a poetry of ideas. His marvelously lyrical insouciance both destabilizes and heroicizes our belief in the poet’s vocation.

—Burt Kimmelman