COMBINATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE

by Albert Goldbarth

"In a book whose subjects range from the high gods of antiquity to the low blows of divorce-spite, and whose strategies move from a seven-line poem about birth to a twenty-page study of contemporary disjunction, Goldbarth expands triumphantly upon his earlier work. For all its lively variety, the book is not so much a collection of separate pieces as a poet's version of the cutting-edge physicist's grand attempt to unify the far-flung elements of our human condition." --From the back cover

Genres: Poetry

175 pages, CD-ROM

First published January 1, 2002

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.

Reviews

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy reading Goldbarth's poems when I come across them in journals, as their exuberant wordiness makes a nice contrast to the spare, restrained poems that fill up most journals nowadays. I especially love the way he can take a common household object and riff on it until it becomes profound. Yet somehow this collection just didn't land for me, and since it's the first collection of his I've read, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just that this is the Albert Goldbarth of 15 years ago, and I like the Albert Goldbarth of right now. Maybe it's that there's such an aura of death and loss that hangs over the poems in this book. In "The Sonnet for Planet 10," he alludes to the fact that his mother is dying, and that kind of trauma always works its way into your writing, whether you want it to or not. Or maybe it's just that I don't really want to read a whole collection of his weird poems back-to-back. I guess someday I'll have to read a more recent collection of his and see.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salt stings