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The Guns and Flags Project
Obsessed with work and dream, shot through with weather and color, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's spirited debut pursues the possibility of the lyric itself--whether the voice raised "with melodies/and thinking" can be rescued from the ongoing disaster of progress. In roving five-beat lines the poems pass again and again through scenes of liminality--sunset and dawn, falling asleep and waking up, border crossings--searching there for a potential ethics and politics of vision, a mutating, rhythmic "project" to oppose the inert spectacle of guns and flags. Like Ashbery stoked on sonics, O'Brien insists that the restless, unsatisfied motion of thought must hold the place for an ever-decaying freedom within the state.
Yet it is not idea alone that flares "passionately in our lives," but the smell of rain, the behavior of clouds, repetitions of these are the subjects of a meditative ecstasy that advances The Guns and Flags Project as an inheritor of the Stevensian tradition, charged with a sense that history's never-ending storm of restoration and ruin cannot be outmaneuvered but might be withstood, and even revised, by song.
Yet it is not idea alone that flares "passionately in our lives," but the smell of rain, the behavior of clouds, repetitions of these are the subjects of a meditative ecstasy that advances The Guns and Flags Project as an inheritor of the Stevensian tradition, charged with a sense that history's never-ending storm of restoration and ruin cannot be outmaneuvered but might be withstood, and even revised, by song.
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Paperback
First published January 23, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 13, 2007
Three times during my reading, and rereading, of this book, I realized the various cafe's I was sitting in were all playing Fine Young Cannibals' She Drives Me Crazy, and I really wanted to make some sort of elaborate symbolism out of it, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't do it.
So I'm sorry to say, this book recommendation will be tragically free of Fine Young Cannibals. O'Brien's poetry, however, is an exercise in pace and line. Imagine if Baudelaire had written Song of Myself and given it over to e.e. cummings to edit. Imagine -- go ahead -- that's where the joy of this book begins. In The Guns and Flags Project we find a new way of listening to and recording the world, the hum of all the deepest shadows around us.
His photographs are large print photographs of a discourse on death at the edge of winter when snow warms to fog, and the world, still asleep, threatens to live again. The beauty in O'Brien's poems are a compelling oxidation. A density of thought woven out as a quilt of a language game with politic in the periphery and at its core, a new mode of interpreting sign and symbol to replace the current, which deteriorates as we watch, unwilling and unable to become involved.
O'Brien's poems are a densely layered world of rich color, cartographers, skys, dichotomies, and the nervous movement of the world. His poems are both smart and clever. Not a syllable goes by that doesn't challenge the reader, all the while respecting the intelligence of his audience. O'Brien refuses to thin out that which does not need to be, a lyric in the vein of John Ashbury and C.D. Wright. He uses subtle refrain, core groups of word and image repeat within poems, and within the book as a whole to create an atmosphere, a climate, and a new landscape of choppy discourse like a failed ocean in autumn.
So I'm sorry to say, this book recommendation will be tragically free of Fine Young Cannibals. O'Brien's poetry, however, is an exercise in pace and line. Imagine if Baudelaire had written Song of Myself and given it over to e.e. cummings to edit. Imagine -- go ahead -- that's where the joy of this book begins. In The Guns and Flags Project we find a new way of listening to and recording the world, the hum of all the deepest shadows around us.
His photographs are large print photographs of a discourse on death at the edge of winter when snow warms to fog, and the world, still asleep, threatens to live again. The beauty in O'Brien's poems are a compelling oxidation. A density of thought woven out as a quilt of a language game with politic in the periphery and at its core, a new mode of interpreting sign and symbol to replace the current, which deteriorates as we watch, unwilling and unable to become involved.
O'Brien's poems are a densely layered world of rich color, cartographers, skys, dichotomies, and the nervous movement of the world. His poems are both smart and clever. Not a syllable goes by that doesn't challenge the reader, all the while respecting the intelligence of his audience. O'Brien refuses to thin out that which does not need to be, a lyric in the vein of John Ashbury and C.D. Wright. He uses subtle refrain, core groups of word and image repeat within poems, and within the book as a whole to create an atmosphere, a climate, and a new landscape of choppy discourse like a failed ocean in autumn.
August 31, 2007
I was lucky enough to take a small creative writing class with Geoffrey and in person he's just as long winded, yet absolutely insightful about life's underbelly.
January 2, 2009
There are some astonishingly beautiful poems in here, although it holds you at arm's length like most books of its time.
September 1, 2010
How is it possible that this book has not been rated before? Is there some flaw in the system that deleted the old one? Or will my rating, also, disappear?
Read this for the second and third times this week, after four or five years lapse. While the first poem has become key to me, in the manner of a poem it reminds me of, Ashbery's "As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat," the rest of the book had been indistinct in memory. Interesting themes emerged, particularly an apparently deep interest in clouds.
Since I tend to read quickly, without being drawn too much into deciphering of ideas, this book suits me in the sense that it seems more interested in rhythms than anything else. Though perhaps that's what someone who reads for rhythms would say -- maybe the ideas that are constantly hinted at or obfuscated are really coherent, if you stop to think. Eh.
Read this for the second and third times this week, after four or five years lapse. While the first poem has become key to me, in the manner of a poem it reminds me of, Ashbery's "As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat," the rest of the book had been indistinct in memory. Interesting themes emerged, particularly an apparently deep interest in clouds.
Since I tend to read quickly, without being drawn too much into deciphering of ideas, this book suits me in the sense that it seems more interested in rhythms than anything else. Though perhaps that's what someone who reads for rhythms would say -- maybe the ideas that are constantly hinted at or obfuscated are really coherent, if you stop to think. Eh.
October 14, 2010
Brought me to tears of frustration. I just can't take being made to feel that there's no point in attempting to figure out what's being said. If there was a point, I was crying before being able to get it. I don't think I should have to rely on the informational blurb on the cover to have a grasp on a book. And I'm not usually like this -- I can't quite explain why I had such a negative reaction, but there it is, I had it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews