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Sky Burial

New and Selected Poems

Peter Gizzi

Cover of Sky Burial by Peter Gizzi
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Categories: 21st Century, American
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (172 pages)
(Pub. Feb 2020)
9781784108229
£14.99 £13.49
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Feb 2020)
9781784108236
£11.99 £10.79
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Gathered from over thirty years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance - in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. Sky Burial is an immensely valuable introduction to his work.

    Watch Peter Gizzi read from Sky Burial online here.


    PETER GIZZI is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Archeophonics (Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award), In Defense of Nothing, and Threshold Songs . His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships in poetry from The Rex Foundation, ... read more
    'A poet of almost unmatched intensity, and its frequent cousin, doubt: unwaveringly masculine and open-hearted, often puzzling his way passionately through an idée fixe... This book is a commendable introduction to an often puzzling, absorbing, increasingly original body of work that can be the stuff of fascination, if you're prepared to move slowly and live with disorientations'
    Rory Waterman, TLS
    'It's an outstanding piece of work, and there's a sense in which it encapsulates Gizzi's achievement as a lyric poet, as the strategies and concerns found in it can be traced throughout his career.'
    Alan Baker, Litter Magazine
    'The poems are continually arresting and expansive, containing Whitmanian multitudes. The result is enjoyably overwhelming... There is so much interesting foam flying off these poems, that read like light glinting off stacked objects in an opened storage unit stuffed to the brim with salvage from the car boot of American poetry, or like Emily Dickinson listening to bees; 'Like trains of cars on tracks of plush'.'

    Lucy Mercer, The White Review
    'This collection superbly represents a body of work spanning over thirty years that assembles from the ether a whole history of the lyric tradition'

    Matthew James Holman, Poetry London
    'It's a finely nuanced piece of verbal craftsmanship, a not-quite-symmetrical set of stanzas that teases and pleases the eye on the page as much as the listening ear.'

    Carol Rumens, from The Guardian where 'Song' was Poem of the Week on 11th February

    The marvelous concept of 'hopescape' is one of the many gifts of Peter Gizzi's Sky Burial, where life is a constant calling to art. Gizzi's songs float free of judgmentalism, in an unflinching appreciation of being. They seek, and they love. Gizzi uncouples poetic vision from the visual, provoking us ever further, into the luminous dark.
    Vahni Capildeo
    Gizzi can move from the ghostly flickering edge of perceptibility to focused intensity at disorienting, Dickinsonian speed. His poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion; Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition.
    Ben Lerner
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