Barter

by Sadoff, Ira

• ISBN13: 9780252028342
• ISBN10: 0252028341
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Ira Sadoff's new volume of poems opens with a quotation from Rilke: "But because truly being here is so much; because everything here / apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us. . . ." The poetry collected here is a response to this call. Rooted firmly in the "fleeting world," Sadoff's poems find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. The poems in Barter delve deeply into the past, the personal past of regret, travel, love, divorce, and bereavement, as well as the global past of Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of communism. Each poem is offered up by Sadoff as a barter, something to be traded for a little more time, a little more understanding.The poems in Barter comment on the power of culture to interject itself into our desire for an idealized self, the way our inner and outer lives lack correspondence, harmony, and integration. They also talk about commerce, the trading of bodies, the way we as a nation "use" and exchange and appropriate -- and like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, try to bargain with and evade the urgency of our time on earth.In the poem "Self-Portrait with a Critic," Sadoff makes what could be a succinct statement of purpose: "And inside, let's not make it pretty, / let's save the off-rhyme and onomatopoeia / / for the concert hall, let's go to the wormy place / where the problematic stirs inside his head."

Table of Contents

PART 1
The Soul	3	(2)
Self-Portrait with Critic	5	(2)
Did You Ever Get a Phone Call	7	(1)
In the Old Days	8	(2)
Nature	10	(2)
Interim Report	12	(1)
Kindertotenlieder	13	(2)
Mahler	15	(2)
In the Jewish Mystical Tradition	17	(2)
Like Angels	19	(2)
Fox Crossing a Field	21	(1)
Nefarious	22	(2)
Whatever It Is	24	(2)
The Lethal Traumas	26	(2)
Where We Lie Down in Heaven	28	(2)
Long Island	30	(2)
The Bangbus	32	(2)
An Uplifting Story	34	(2)
In the Emerald Isle	36	(3)
PART 2
A Brief History of the Century	39	(2)
What Kind of Man	41	(2)
In Siena	43	(2)
Jazz	45	(2)
Back Then	47	(1)
At the Frick	48	(2)
At the Creek Club	50	(2)
The Cold War	52	(2)
The New Russia	54	(2)
Iran/Iraq	56	(1)
My Country	57	(2)
The Ex-Husband	59	(1)
Scenario	60	(1)
Song	61	(1)
I've Always Despised the Wetlands	62	(2)
Honeymoon in Florence	64	(2)
The Brightness	66	(1)
Material	67	(3)
I Forget Who Compared the Soul	70