Poetry

63 pages, 6 x 9

978-865544-4522-9

$16.00t, Paper

Online price $12.80

You Save $3.20

MUP/P112

Stephen Bluestone

“These poems are heroic journeys across the dangerous territories of the spirit, those landscapes of despair where all paths narrow toward death.  They do exactly what all good poems do, they point us toward the mysteries, they teach us the right questions to ask.  But more than this, out of their darkest moments they wrench consoling insight and illumination.  I might even say joy.  Always poignant and often startling, The Laughing Monkeys of Gravity is a remarkable collection of poems, one to savor.”

“Stephen Bluestone dazzlingly ranges across history, philosophy, spirituality, and the arts in The Laughing Monkeys of Gravity as he explores ‘These dead kin’ who ‘are not so perfectly dead/ as not to be somehow in motion,/ somehow stored up in us.’  As he wittily says of Emily Dickinson, he sees the ‘union of divisions.’  The title poem, a brilliant meditation on the great comedians of our century, is a joy.”

“Stephen Bluestone’s poems, haunted by voices of the far and recent past, take us through the difficult passages from melancholy and loss toward love.  They are religious poems in the widest and best sense—searching, intelligent, expansive—poems whose achievement is beauty and spiritual wisdom.”

“Stephen Bluestone’s poems do miraculous things, by force of language directed through his fierce peculiar rhythm; best, they preserve what they value. _… In Stephen Bluestone’s old opera singers, in his ‘afternoon/ on its way into history,’ and in his recovered ‘Circumstance of the Porch.’ He provides what the age never demands but deeply requires.”