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In Memory of Brilliance & Value
In his third collection, Michael Robins unleashes the couplet to bring the pastoral past into the modern day, aligning images of grazing buffalo with those of torture and war. In the intersection between reality and imagination, with violence flowing like a river beneath us at all times, these lyric poems offer associative and sonic shifts that drive the speaker s narrative insights. Like a mad chef on a tear, Robins concocts small poetic miracles using equal parts wonder and terror. His dishes are meticulously crafted and served up with gusto. We cannot help but relish in them."
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2015
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About the author
Michael Robins
10Ìýbooks17ÌýfollowersMichael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. Born in Portland, Oregon, he lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA Program at McNeese State University.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 19, 2015
By no means does Michael Robins new collection need a defense â€� his definition of couplet and his deft and rich observational eye do more work than I was ready for â€� but I found myself renaming the book in my own head, over and over, after each poems reading and rereading and rereading again, wanting to put it into the context of a new title that kept creeping into my mind, which is: In Defense of Memory, Brilliance & Value (which I would never truly suggest). Because that is what rung for me in his musicality (and in the silence when that musicality seems to disappear from the page, in a good way, (or is this time for a John Cage argument?) that there is a strong position to these poems, to the collection, to the five segments they are broken into. And positions, by definition, are worth defending. And while I don't imagine there is a pending attack (although, I'd want to see how Michael would fight back if one crept up his flank), rather that there is so much Value in here, worth all the Memory rendered in Brilliance –Ìýthat I suspect are some of his memories but just as well are mine, now â€� more than nostalgia, more than music and form, more than anecdotes. Some could call that an ineffable quality, which is a compliment to the poet, except that all that that is his (or is mine if we magically shared some common history) IS touchable and accessible. I need to find a better way to say this. Or he already did. But it's worth putting this out there in case you are trying to decide whether you have time for this book. I would say you should make the time.
January 28, 2016
"In Memory of Brilliance & Value" delivers couplets of human experience. Often, the poems lean toward a dreamlike surrealism, or a memory, or perhaps your own memory. Poems where the reader can impose their own narrative � “Where crowds save face by removing / their faces. Save anesthesia & its letters // from a faraway nowhere.� Poems that make the human experience valuable � the plight of refugees in one of my favorites, “Song of the Second Fiddle�
We pray, migrate west & inscribe
the bloated deer, they who crawl
obliquely like we do. Hammering,
feeling sorry, muttered and arrowed.
We watch women flee the river
& ourselves from the din of the city.
Even more intriguing, what is really “Outside the Pay-Per-View Museum�? And poems filled with long, lovely-stretchy lines & lists where you wonder if the words are nouns or verbs (or both): “You swear for rabbits, rockets, / stretch the pedal floored. You // burrow books & comb feelings inversely to the heart, pillbox // & flesh, pages buzzed into rage.�
After reading the whole book once, I went back and re-read it again and had a completely different notion. Had some of the narratives changed? or had I changed?
We pray, migrate west & inscribe
the bloated deer, they who crawl
obliquely like we do. Hammering,
feeling sorry, muttered and arrowed.
We watch women flee the river
& ourselves from the din of the city.
Even more intriguing, what is really “Outside the Pay-Per-View Museum�? And poems filled with long, lovely-stretchy lines & lists where you wonder if the words are nouns or verbs (or both): “You swear for rabbits, rockets, / stretch the pedal floored. You // burrow books & comb feelings inversely to the heart, pillbox // & flesh, pages buzzed into rage.�
After reading the whole book once, I went back and re-read it again and had a completely different notion. Had some of the narratives changed? or had I changed?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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