Poetry

63 pages, 6 x 9

978-865544-4522-9

$16.00t, Paper

MUP/P112

Stephen Bluestone


Critical Praise
Excerpts

The Laughing Monkeys of Gravity is divided into three sections, each of which deals with a single major theme.  The first section, “Landscapes and Seasons,” consists of reflections on the lives of religious figures—Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Isaac, and Miriam—and the subject, either as background or foreground, of many of the poems in that section is the Holocaust.  The second section, “A Vaudeville of the Heart,” is a ten-part meditation on comedy and loneliness in which the main characters are old-movie comedians: Laurel and Hardy, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Lou Costello, the Three Stooges, and others.  In their moments of loneliness, the old comedians salvage the spirit, affirm the will to endure, and sidestep despair.  The final section, “Songs and Voices,” begins and ends with two contrasting elegies on death and loss.  The poems in this section explore the struggle to transform private vision into song—many that we hear are those of Enrico Caruso, Franz Schubert, Leonardo da Vinci, and Emily Dickinson. Out of suffering and desire and the thirst for knowledge comes the poetry by which we know the singers to whose songs we listen in order to find our deepest selves.

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Stephen Bluestone was born in New York City.  His poems have received numerous awards, among them the Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and second prize in the Robert Penn Warren competition.  A musical setting of the title poem of The Laughing Monkeys of Gravity was given its world premiere in the fall of 2003.  Stephen Bluestone teaches English and film in the College of Liberal Arts at Mercer University.

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