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Small Talk: Poems
“Elegant and intimate… Delbos proves his deep attunement to the natural, and to bright blasts of language.”
–Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
Small Talk reimagines idle chatter with heightened lyricism and expansive scope in poems that are devoted to the minute particulars of life and language.
The book’s first section, “Here Nor There,” moves among diverse locations including Plymouth, Prague, Salzburg and Belgrade. These poems meditate on translocality, examining the evanescence of relationships and experience, the intimacy of presence and absence, and memory’s perseverance.
The long poem “A Child’s Guide to Candor” records and reflects upon a child’s journey toward speech, exploring a parent’s role in providing their children’s words, and interrogating the relationship between language, nationality, family roles and relationships.
“News and Selected Poems,” the last section, begins with poems addressing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the bombing of the Boston Marathon, and violence in Gaza, considering the relationships between event, language, and media presentation. The ensuing elegies and narrative poems allude to cultural figures including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Charles Bronson, Dick Gregory, Michael Jackson, Pilgrim settlers and Wampanoag tribespeople, scrutinizing the overlap of personal and public history, and the creation of cultural identity.
–Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
Small Talk reimagines idle chatter with heightened lyricism and expansive scope in poems that are devoted to the minute particulars of life and language.
The book’s first section, “Here Nor There,” moves among diverse locations including Plymouth, Prague, Salzburg and Belgrade. These poems meditate on translocality, examining the evanescence of relationships and experience, the intimacy of presence and absence, and memory’s perseverance.
The long poem “A Child’s Guide to Candor” records and reflects upon a child’s journey toward speech, exploring a parent’s role in providing their children’s words, and interrogating the relationship between language, nationality, family roles and relationships.
“News and Selected Poems,” the last section, begins with poems addressing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the bombing of the Boston Marathon, and violence in Gaza, considering the relationships between event, language, and media presentation. The ensuing elegies and narrative poems allude to cultural figures including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Charles Bronson, Dick Gregory, Michael Jackson, Pilgrim settlers and Wampanoag tribespeople, scrutinizing the overlap of personal and public history, and the creation of cultural identity.
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2021
5 people want to read
About the author
Stephan Delbos
20 books15 followersStephan 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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 3, 2022
This strong collection of poems by poet and translator Stephan Delbos stretches from the US, especially Plymouth, Mass. to Europe, especially Prague. The highlight is the extended sequence "A Child's Guide to Candor," for his first child. By turns domestic, nostalgic and hallucinatory, a new father marvels at the wonder of a new life, a new role, and all of the dreams and fears that entails.
For more see: https://roughghosts.com/2022/02/03/tw...
For more see: https://roughghosts.com/2022/02/03/tw...
July 12, 2021
What's not to love when Delbos keeps you guessing what he'll pull next from the hat, in this case a book in three parts: Here Nor There, A Child's Guide to Candor, and News & Selected Poems.
In the first section, the reader moves through rhythmic observations of Berlin, Belgrade, Salzburg, Prague, Plymouth... in the second, the ultimate trip of parenthood takes off, with my favorite lines from the book: "What is family? / Blood architecture. / Seasons of mind. / Rooms and furniture. / Bottles of words. / Charted worries. / Bookshelves of names. / Living photographs. / Lost property. / A story written / of flesh and forgiveness."
Section three provides historical context to the aforementioned, in some ways reminiscent of the lesser-known Beat book 1968 by Ed Sanders, the historical references somehow reversed to be more grounded in the history of the author. "Poem for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)" is one example, where the news of the Russian author's death reaches the author and his friends in a bar, resulting in a meta-experience for him, his friends, and Mandelstam.
Delbos is no stranger to 'poetry of place', and he succeeds in taking the reader along on a journey of discovery – of geography, history, and the self in context (or rather the self, with geography and history in context) – all the while, a subtle, nearly inaudible jazz soundtrack inherent in his observations.
In the first section, the reader moves through rhythmic observations of Berlin, Belgrade, Salzburg, Prague, Plymouth... in the second, the ultimate trip of parenthood takes off, with my favorite lines from the book: "What is family? / Blood architecture. / Seasons of mind. / Rooms and furniture. / Bottles of words. / Charted worries. / Bookshelves of names. / Living photographs. / Lost property. / A story written / of flesh and forgiveness."
Section three provides historical context to the aforementioned, in some ways reminiscent of the lesser-known Beat book 1968 by Ed Sanders, the historical references somehow reversed to be more grounded in the history of the author. "Poem for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)" is one example, where the news of the Russian author's death reaches the author and his friends in a bar, resulting in a meta-experience for him, his friends, and Mandelstam.
Delbos is no stranger to 'poetry of place', and he succeeds in taking the reader along on a journey of discovery – of geography, history, and the self in context (or rather the self, with geography and history in context) – all the while, a subtle, nearly inaudible jazz soundtrack inherent in his observations.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews