Constant Longing

by Sampson, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9780887483004
• ISBN10: 0887483003
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-02-01
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr

Summary

In an era of handsomely written books of poetry largely about their own skill with language, it's more than a little breathtaking to encounter a poet who writes for the most basic reason: Because he has to. That emotional and psychic pressure that derives from the absolute need to write is almost everywhere in this book, and it gives the poems at times an almost unbearable urgency....

Author Biography

Dennis Sampson is Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University.

Table of Contents

ONE
Evening Inventory	11	(1)
Speaking The Names	12	(2)
Coming Back To Keats	14	(2)
The Good Night Of Sleep	16	(1)
The Snapping Turtle at Templeton Pond	17	(2)
In Hell	19	(2)
Laundry In Venice	21	(8)
Variegated Arbicola: An Elegy	29	(2)
What Is Written Down	31	(2)
Blue Photograph	33	(1)
Devotional	34	(1)
A Passion In The Desert	35	(3)
The Confession	38	(4)
Pig Iron	42	(3)
Reading Habits	45	(1)
Letter To Elizabeth	46	(1)
Looking Up At Something	47	(4)
TWO
This Moment	51	(2)
Holy Waste	53	(18)
THREE
Directions	71	(1)
Litany	72	(2)
The Leopard	74	(2)
The Anaconda	76	(2)
Shadows	78	(2)
Sister, Sister	80	(2)
Afternoon Nap	82	(1)
Pausing Between One Page And Another In A Novel	83	(4)
Wallace Stegner
From One Who Knew Him Intimately	87	(1)
The Kiss	88	(3)
Canticle For The Conclusion Of Spring	91	(1)
Original Pleasure	92	(1)
Last Will And Testament	93	(2)
In The Light Of My Lamp	95