Sign-In
Cart
Saint with a Peacock Voice
Paperback
Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry
ISBN13: 9781643175010
Publisher: Parlor Press
Published: Jan 7 2025
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.21 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
L. S. Klatt's Saint with a Peacock Voice is such a fascinating and rewarding experiment! Part cento, part erasure, part collaboration, part puppet show (though is Klatt puppeteering O'Connor, or is O'Connor puppeteering Klatt?), these poems cohere into a pure, mysterious lyric mindscape, an exploration of how language is always fundamentally both interior and shared. The O'Connor we find in these poems can be our contemporary, addressing such things as 9/11 and global warming, and the Klatt we encounter can't help but return obsessively to O'Connor's complex and stark views on God. I've never read a book quite like this before, in which two minds wear each other and each other's language in such a sustained way. The result is a true deepening and enlarging of what the lyric can be. -Wayne Miller
I can well imagine the poet savoring O'Connor's idiom, phrasings, and rhythms, as he combs through the work to find words to suit his purposes. The result is a bell-choir of language, unearthed from its original context and set into the ground of another. Now we have a collection of cranky poems that long for spiritual answers. Of course, those answers don't arrive, but the implied questions lurking behind the poems make themselves known by their absence, and the absence is a rich reward. This book puts me in mind of Marianne Moore and her fantastic beasts, and also of Wallace Stevens's philosophical inquiries of the absurd. These are strange and beautiful poems, carefully wrought and attendant to all measures of reverence. This is a transcendent and illuminating book, sharp and penetrating in all ways. The poems linger with the reader, sometimes with a lull and sometimes with a twitch, as they should. -Maurice Manning
In Saint with a Peacock Voice, L. S. Klatt wrenches surprise from the familiar-which, after all, is one of the things poetry ought to do, maybe the thing. However, with regard to familiarity-if Klatt didn't declare that the poems are all (something like) remixes of pieces Flannery O'Connor wrote, the reader might not know. Nor does one find chopped-up prose here, even though, strictly speaking, that's what these poems are. Here, instead, are new, exciting poems that are yet afterlives of writing that came before them. These poems are doubly alive. -Shane McCrae
Saint with a Peacock Voice is a fascinating study in the beauty and possibility of poetic constraint. These fine-wrought lyrics, built from Flannery O'Connor's ecstatic lexicon, are full of new music and spiritual depth. Poem by poem, we witness a keenly attentive, exploratory speaker emerge from the dense thicket of received language. I admire this poignant & particular voice as it celebrates & grieves for our troubled world, making a violent butterfly, something strange and gold. -Kiki Petrosino
About the AuthorL.S. Klatt's first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize, awarded by the University of Massachusetts Press. His second, Cloud of Ink, garnered the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. Sunshine Wound was published by Parlor Press in 2015. Klatt lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he formerly served as poet laureate of the city.
Also from
Klatt, L. S.
Also in
Poetry Criticism
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Laux, Dorianne
Addonizio, Kim
Paperback
Letters to a Young Poet: With the Letters to Rilke from the ''Young Poet''
Searls, Damion
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Kappus, Franz Xaver
Hardcover
Poem a Day: 366 Poems, Old and New - One for Each Day of the Year
McCosker, Karen
Albery, Nicolas
Paperback
Faeries, Sprites & Malevolent Spirits: An Anthology of Classic Poetry & Stories
Thorne, Aurora
Hardcover
Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (1922)
Johnson, E. Pauline
Paperback
Poetry from Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry
Rahimtoola, Samia
Paperback
The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition): Including Sor Filotea's Letter and New Selected Poems
de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés
Paperback
The Enclosures of Free Verse: Racializing Poetic Form in the Modernist Era
Kappeler, Erin Joyce
Paperback
Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry: Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani on the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series
Abani, Chris
Dawes, Kwame
Paperback
Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions: A Library of America Paperback Classic
Whitman, Walt
Paperback