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Call Waiting

David C. Ward

Cover of Call Waiting by David Ward
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, American, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2014)
9781847772268
Out of Stock
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2014)
9781847774644
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Description
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  • Reviews
  • The river was the river’s before it was ours. 
    Pull back and see it as it was. Reverse the flow 
    Of time and unpeel our landscape from the land. 
    Take the names and maps away…

    from ‘The River Refuses its Name’
    David C. Ward's first full-length poetry collection combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America – its landscapes, its history, its politics. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives, from Andy Warhol or Weldon Kees (‘Case closed. / No body was ever found’) to Ward’s own father, playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book’s final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 USA and its self-deceptions.
    David C. Ward is a Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004) ... read more
    'These graceful, powerful poems catch the reader’s attention at every turn. Memories of family, flashbacks of place and deft images of civic life grow through craft and music into powerful self-questionings about purpose, mortality and even art itself. This is a memorable and moving book and these are poems to savour and re-read.'
    Eavan Boland
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