Holy Worm of Praise: Poems

by Schultz, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780151006663
• ISBN10: 0151006660
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

The holy worm of our tongues singing praise our faces shining like cities our being one among many our climbing Jacob's ladder to rock in the arms of angels our walking here and there on the earth and looking around Philip Schultz's work has always evoked "a brilliant cavalcade of people and images that make you want to laugh and cry at the same time" (Yehuda Amichai), but the poems in this new collection-his first in fifteen years--register a movement from desire, pain, and loss to sympathy, understanding, and love. In these meditations on friendship and the forgotten of our world, these elegies for the displaced and cherished dead, there is something new and wonderful-praise. From the seemingly trivial hums and beeps of an answering machine to the painful experience of being touched by Alzheimer's, these extraordinary poems suffuse human experience with the wonder, laughter, and luminosity of life. With an intensity akin to prayer, they celebrate love--be it sexual, familial, romantic, or otherwise--in all its wonder and complexity, singing praise for what is most vulnerable, beautiful, and innocent in ourselves.

Author Biography

Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry. His work has been published in countless magazines, including the New Yorker, Partisan Review, the New Republic, and the Paris Review. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

Table of Contents

PART 1
The Holy Worm of Praise	3	(2)
My Friend Is Making Himself	5	(1)
Change	6	(2)
A Woman's Touch	8	(2)
Epithalamion	10	(1)
Courtship According to My Guardian Angel Stein	11	(1)
Flying Dogs	12	(1)
City Dogs	13	(2)
Marking	15	(1)
On First Hearing of Your Conception	16	(3)
PART 2
The Monologue	19	(1)
Solitaire	20	(1)
Sick	21	(1)
Disintegration	22	(1)
The Inside and The Outside	23	(1)
The Nutritive Values	24	(1)
The Answering Machine	25	(1)
The front left window	26	(1)
TV Series	27	(1)
Ars Poetica	28	(1)
Juror's Manual	29	(1)
Three Conversations Overheard in the Summer of 1999	30	(1)
On the corner	31	(1)
Personally	32	(1)
The Extra	33	(2)
The Stuntman	35	(1)
Prison Doctor	36	(3)
PART 3
The Dead	39	(1)
In Medias Res	40	(2)
The Displaced	42	(1)
The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem	43	(2)
I Remember	45	(1)
Alzheimer's	46	(1)
Apartment Sale	47	(1)
Nomads	48	(1)
Stories	49	(2)
Darwin, Sweeping	51	(1)
The Eight-Mile Bike Ride	52	(2)
The Silence	54	(2)
Mr. McGuire	56	(1)
The Dalai Lama	57	(1)
To William Dickey	58	(1)
Stein, Good-bye	59	(1)
The dark between	60	(2)
Mr. Parsky	62	(7)
PART 4
Souls Over Harlem	69	(26)
Acknowledgments	95