Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer: Poems

by Steve Scafidi

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts. In a rushing, rolling style, poems sweep to the edge of falling apart, take great delight in defying that dissolution, and come upon a thing redemptive and the fact of love. In a world that “doesn’t really care / whether we live or die,” Steve Scafidi writes, “tell it you do and why.” From the unthinkable to the quietly heroic, somehow we have emerged. Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer celebrates that fact most of all.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Steve Scafidi is the author of four poetry collections, including Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer and To the Bramble and the Briar. He lives in Summit Point, West Virginia.

Reviews

[Ksenija · Rating 5 out of 5]

scafidi is a staple of my bedside table, to read a poem or two before going to sleep. i was introduced to his poetry when garrison keillor featured "prayer for a marriage" in his book "good poems," and have found that this slim volume was well worth the special order purchase.

[Donnelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have yet to read the poetry of Steve Scafidi . . . then you are in for a real treat . . . this is a poet with much to say . . .

[riona · Rating 4 out of 5]

the work of a clearly well read but entirely ordinary, hardworking man who lives in a house in the woods and loves his wife very much, as he does the raucous everyday beauty of the woods he calls his home, just as much as he loves stretching a sentence to its absolute taffy limit for each of his poems. and they are beautiful. he will trip your reading up but it is important you keep going because the last line either ties it all together or shatters time as you know it, and each foray is always worth it.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The everyday sublime.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scafidi has a knack for building poems that unfold a cosmic sense of time. Very little is bound to the arc of a human lifetime, or even to human history. Instead, the losses and loves evoked in the poems are placed in the context of a much grander scale of history, and so paradoxically take on both more weight and less. I enjoyed that slightly dizzying feeling, which was reinforced by whirling run-on sentences and careening turns of enjambment.

One drawback of the book came in moments when sonic play seemed to override sense-making, especially at the ends of poems. Sometimes the rhyme and repetition in the poems led to complex and surprising results, but too often, the poems snapped shut on exact rhymes that felt a little too pat. Because this technique appeared in most of the poems, any pleasures it initially offered wore thin by the end of the book.

[stephanie roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Scafidi is the Terrence Malick of poetry. I adore his work to the degree that i can't help but believe his religion and mine are the same.

Evening comes to surprising ends—
darkness in the bright of things,
noises in quiet stillness,
movements under everything.