That Singing

by Temple Cone

Temple Cone's latest collection, That Singing, recreates the mythic world in a way that restores its immediacy, its loves, its losses, its conflicted passions. Temple Cone is a writer with a sure and deft touch, and as these poems unravel themselves to reveal the inner workings of a world, they braid themselves together in unexpected and transcendent ways. On the surface, That Singing serves as an intimate witness to the lives of the gods, but venture deeper into the world of these poems and you ll discover the gods living within each of us, that which is altogether tragic, and beautifully human. --Brian Turner "The stories always get it wrong," Temple Cone tells us in these ecstatic lyrics. The stories are the Greeks', and what's always been wrong is point of view, the masculine gaze, the silence of the beloved. Through the familiar pairings of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hades and Persephone, Hippomenes and Atalanta, Odysseus and his many counterparts--Penelope, Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso--Temple Cone makes the stories right. He creates a series of duets, polyphony where there was only the single voice before. Love is both night and daybreak, that singing in the darkness. Each poem is our guide between the underworld and the wide green fields above. --Jehanne Dubrow

68 pages, Paperback

Published December 19, 2011

About the author

Temple Cone is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and the author of four books of poetry: guzzle, from FutureCycle Press (2016); That Singing, from March Street Press (2011); The Broken Meadow, which received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Press Series Prize; and No Loneliness, which received the 2009 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize. He has also published six poetry chapbooks, as well as reference works on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Walt Whitman, and 20th-Century American Poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Wisconsin, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington and Lee University.