The Lions

by Campion, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780226093109
• ISBN10: 0226093107
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Big Avalanche Ravine Just the warning light on a blue crane. Just mountains. Just the mist that skimmed them both and bled to silver rain lashing the condominiums. But there it sank on me. This urge to carve a life from the long expanse. To hold some ground against the surge of sheer material. It was a tense and persistent and metallic shiver. And it stayed, that tremor, small and stark as the noise of the hidden river fluming its edge against the dark. In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge "to carve a space" for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara (who makes a startling appearance in the title poem), then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. InThe Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation. Praise forOther People "Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight."David Biespiel,The Oregonian

Author Biography

 

Peter Campion is assistant professor of English at Auburn University, editor of Literary Imagination, and a recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of Other People, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

In Early March Embarcadero Bad

Reception Magnolias Capitalism

Scrapbook: 2006 The Great Divide

So Here Is How We Live Now

The Presidio: After Morning Thunder Invisible Bird Simile

In Late August 1980

Iran Just Now 1989

Death on the Nile Lethe

New Hampshire: Lake at the Back of Memory Big Avalanche

Ravine Lilacs

Sparrow Protest Recurring Dream in a New Home

The Lions Display Copy September

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