Portrait in a spoon
poems
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Author
Publication
1997 - University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, S.C, South Carolina
Language
English
Description
By turns comic and poignant, the poems in Portrait in a Spoon explore the uses and abuses of language as it intersects the uses and abuses of power. Taking George Eliot's observation that even Milton, looking at himself in a spoon, would have to "submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin," James Cummins investigates questions of identity - the illusions we sustain, the passions we conceal, and the stories that surround both. In his previous collection of sestinas, The Whole Truth, Cummins rewrote to absurd and magisterial ends the Perry Mason saga. In this much-awaited second volume of poems, he again trains his eye on culture - high and low, popular and elitist - to explore and explode the myths and mythos of making. He finds the spoon that encloses and discloses, like John Ashbery's mirror, distorts as it explains. It has its analogue in the closed forms that he masterfully employs here: epigram, sonnet, villanelle, and sestina.
Subjects
Series Statement
- The James Dickey contemporary poetry series
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