The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995

by Michael Palmer

The Lion Bridge, Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer's extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly avant-garde, Palmer's work has a matchless beauty, difficult to describe: as Common Knowledge remarked, "Even more than its music, it emanates silence." The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. This generous chronological selection includes individual poems, selections from serial poems, and two complete serial poems. Together the poems form a bridge, a kind of work-biography which takes a long look at an extraordinary achievement and gives a new view of a body of work as the poet himself wishes it to be seen. It also rescues from limbo so much material that has gone out of print. The Lion Bridge presents work from seven of his books: Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages.

Genres: Poetry

276 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

Michael Palmer is a poet associated with the Language Poetry movement; he is also a translator and has worked on art with painters and dancers.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Palmer's interweaving of language, lyric, and history is almost unique in American poetry, and I believe he is a somewhat under-read poet because of people over-estimating his difficulty and frame of reference. This is a great introduction to the Michael Palmer's work spinning from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. Palmer's deep opposition to the confessional turn in late modernism is clear in the fugue quality in his earlier work. While often linked to Language poetry and to post-Objectivist poetry, Palmer's poetry feels more out of Spanish and French poetry as much as American. Often his poetry is elliptical where subtext is as important as text, but does not mean his poetry is unapproachable.