The Not Forever

As the title of The Not Forever suggests, these poems take not only mortality, but also the impossibility of truly assessing mortality, as their endlessly inexplicable subject. Keith Waldrop's language is, by turns, wry, brazen, brilliant, humorous, sorrowful, and entirely unforgettable as he focuses upon all that cannot be absorbed by the logical mind's measure of aging and loss. Waldrop is a master at discerning what is recognizable within the "not" of our attention whether it is an attention to the future, the past, or to that instant we call the present, which is the most impossible to grasp. His canny meditations make the particulars of daily life shine with an uncanny brilliance as he assesses the quintessentially human inability to exact knowledge from the existence that we live, as well as from the inexistence that we each are veering toward. A major force in American avantgarde poetics for decades, Waldrop gives us an emotionally compelling, intellectually demanding articulation of what living in full awareness of the "not forever" means.

Author: Keith Waldrop
Publisher: Omnidawn
Published: 10/01/2013
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN13: 9781890650889
ISBN10: 1890650889
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
KEITH WALDROP is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Transcendental Studies (University of California Press, 2009), a trilogy of collage poems which won the National Book Award for Poetry. Also, Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009), a collection of collages and a translation of Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Wesleyan, 2009). His other work includes The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon: With Sample Poems (Omnidawn, 2004). His other collections of poetry include The House Seen from Nowhere (2003), Haunt (2000), Well Well Reality (1998, with Rosmarie Waldrop), and the trilogy The Locality Principle (1995), The Silhouette of the Bridge, which won the Americas Award for Poetry (1997), and Semiramis, If I Remember (2001). He has translated several contemporary French poets, such as Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Dominique Fourcade, Jean Grosjean, and Paol Keineg. In 2006, he completed a translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (Wesleyen University Press). Waldrop has received an award from the Fund for Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Berlin Artists Program of the DAAD. In 2000, he received a Medal from the French government with rank of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters, for lifetime contribution to French literature. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he has retired from teaching at Brown University. He has served as co-editor of Burning Deck Press with his wife Rosmarie Waldrop since 1968.