A Field Guide to the Heavens (Volume 15)

by Frank X. Gaspar

In Frank Gaspar's beautiful and exacting book, A Field Guide to the Heavens, is a compassed and sculptured map that leads to what is purely human. There aren't any abstract angels here, only the breath of quest and raw life-from the symbolic gecko to the mythic Apostle Paul and Caesar. This collection is highly democratic and spiritual, where George Herbert is only a few pages away from Allen Ginsberg. Gaspar's material is composed of the stuff we are made an approximation of the old, need-driven songs of the spirit and flesh shaped out of imagination and autobiography -Yusef Komunyakaa "This poet is a good storyteller. He knows what will interest you, and he doesn't present himself as transcendental. . . . I like the way he talks about a dozen things in one poem" -Robert Bly "Frank Gaspar has arrived, in this book, at an adult voice of startling presence and power, a voice at once humble and confident, doubting and authoritative. . . . he returns us to poetry's perennial, inexhaustible the old verities of the self's engagement with love and time, with meaning and chaos, are shaped here into something alive, something generous, selfless, and new" -Mark Doty Frank X. Gaspar's collection of poems is haunted by the presence of mystics and Mohammed, Buddha, St. Paul, Augustine, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Milton, Rilke. A Field Guide to the Heavens is punctuated with designs of science, the wondering and rapt observations of the sky made at the eyepiece of a backyard telescope. We come to know Gaspar's city streets, the neighbors and strangers that walk them, the wreckage of past lives, the ocean, the gardens, the orchards and alleys and parking lots, all spread out under the vast sky.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

100 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaspar is one of the greatest poets to ever live, and I absolutely love his work.

[martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first poem of Gaspar's I read was the fantastic you can't be a star in the sky without holy fire. Unfortunately there were none in this book I loved *quite* as much, but it still had some lines I liked enough to write down, particularly in his poems about summer mania.

[Danielle DeTiberus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not unlike Larry Levis, Gaspar writes poetry that leaps gracefully from one subject matter to the next, using swirling syntax and a wry, self-referential tone.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection--definitely going to buy a copy for the house.