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    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
    Ebook179 pages3 hours

    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

    By Jack Ridl

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Jack Ridl returns with a collection of poems that mix deft artistic skill with intimate meditations on everyday life, whether that be curiosity, loss, discovery, joy, or the passing of the seasons. An early reader of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch said it best: "Ridl’s books are all treasures, as is he, and his poetry has always been trout-quick, alternately funny and wondrous, instantly intimate, and free of pretense. All these characteristics can be found in this book, and there is something else, something extraordinary: at an age where most poets are content to roll out an imagined posterity, he’s decided to push and refine the art, to see out the day and live it fully, because art and life settle for no less."

    The first section of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch reflects on the author’s personal history, with poems like "Feeding the Pup in the Early Morning" and "Some of What Was Left After Therapy." The second section continues with meditations on varied events and persons and includes poems such as "The Last Days of Sam Snead" and "Coffee Talks with Con Hilberry." The third attends primarily to the mystery of love and what one loves and contains the poems "The Inevitable Sorrow of Potatoes" and "Suite for the Long Married." The fourth and final section meditates primarily on the imagined in poems like "Over in That Corner, the Puppets" and "Meditation on a Photograph of a Man Jumping a Puddle in the Rain."

    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch is the work of a talented and seasoned poet, one whose work comes out of the "plainspoken" tradition—the kind of poetry that, as Thomas Lynch puts it, "has to deliver the goods, has to say something about life, something clear and discernible, or it has little to offer." Readers of poetry who enjoy wrestling with life’s big questions will appreciate the space that Ridl allows for these ruminations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2019
    ISBN9780814346464
    Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
    Author

    Jack Ridl

    Jack Ridl is professor of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and poetry journals. Broken Symmetry is his third volume of poetry. Ridl has also published three chapbooks, two college literary textbooks, two literary anthologies, and is recipient of several awards for his teaching of young poets.

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      Book preview

      Saint Peter and the Goldfinch - Jack Ridl

      Advance praise for Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

      Open this book to page 27 and read ‘Ice Storm.’ Feel how it settles in your chest, how your breath resounds with a long, deep, ‘Yes,’ how subtly you are changed by what you didn’t know you knew. I’ve been reading Jack Ridl’s poems with admiration and wonder for almost forty years now and this new work goes ever deeper into the intensified heart of our everyday lives.

      —Dan Gerber

      The amazing poetry of Jack Ridl is written ‘in the dust along the windowsill, / the star’s lost light falling across / the vase of flowers on the kitchen table.’ They are windows opening to mortality; they strike with the grace of starlight, and the warmth of flowers beside a meal. Ridl never fails to illuminate.

      —Terrance Hayes, poet and professor

      These poems typically begin with a series of quiet, levelheaded observationsand end in a wild imaginative leap. Jack Ridl has found a pattern that delights and surprises us poem by poem.

      —Billy Collins

      For a long time now, Jack Ridl has understood The Word, The Logos, as a meeting place of the body and the mind, the past and the emerging present, time and eternity, the concrete and the abstract, the inner and the outer worlds, the human will and the unknown, and he has practiced said Word as a way to clarify his heart, rectify his spirit, and demystify the workings of the human eye in order to realize human consciousness as a blessing, rather than a blight characterized by confusion and error. In his latest book, we witness his practice deepening, and not far below the warm and neighborly tone of these poems is the sound of a man more and more alone with The Alone. By salvaging what he can of the real and immediate world around him, he preserves for us the idea of The Human as precious and worth saving.

      —Li-Young Lee, author of The Undressing

      Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

      Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

      Poems by Jack Ridl

      WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Detroit

      MADE IN MICHIGAN WRITERS SERIES

      GENERAL EDITORS

      Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

      M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

      A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      © 2019 by Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4645-7 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4646-4 (e-book)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959986

      Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation. This work is supported in part by an award from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

      Wayne State University Press

      Leonard N. Simons Building

      4809 Woodward Avenue

      Detroit, Michigan 48201–1309

      Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      For Julie, Meridith, and Betsy

      Contents

      Likely

      The Train Home

      It Was Last Night, I Think

      Wondering What It Was Like

      American Suite for a Lost Daughter

      While the Dog Sleeps

      Garage Sale

      Is It Virginia Woolf I’m Thinking Of?

      Feeding the Pup in the Early Morning

      The Mallards

      Thinking Again of My Daughter

      The Nonattachment of Buddhism

      My Brother—A Star

      The Book of Rain

      The Day After William Stafford Died

      The Line

      After the Thirteenth Shock Treatment

      The Train Home

      I Almost Saw a Rabbit Today

      Self-Pity as an Ars Poetica

      Ice Storm

      Some of What Was Left After Therapy

      Turning to the Psalter

      The Man Who Decided to See

      The Man Who Decided to See

      Dailiness

      The Last Days of Sam Snead

      After Learning a Literary Magazine’s Editor Expects the First Line to Be a Grabber

      The Bird Maker

      Levitating Frogs

      It’s What He Does Instead

      Coffee Talks with Con Hilberry

      The Night Before the MLA, Casey Stengel Appears to the Postmodernist Theorists

      The Week After

      The Man Who Made Towers of Beach Glass

      This American Walking the Winter Streets of Tübingen, Germany: A Postcard

      Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

      Watching

      Packing the Boxes

      Heaven

      Rising over the Smoke

      The World in May Is Leafing Out

      Chamber Musicians Also Wash the Dishes, Check the Mail

      He of the Long Wait

      The Long Married

      Suite for Another Day in the World

      The Inevitable Sorrow of Potatoes

      Key West Suite

      Remembering the Night I Dreamed Paul Klee Married the Sky

      Let It Snow

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