Beautiful False Things: Poems

By Irving Feldman

Book Overview

This tenth collection of Irving Feldman's poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized as a body of work singular in its lyric, visionary, even prophetic intensity; its extravagant wit; its powerful storytelling; and its variety of voices and range of feeling - playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things, the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of "Funny Bones" duels with death in Florida; in "Oedipus Host," Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky feminist heroine of "Heavenly Muse" visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, "translation" comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802136575
• ISBN13: 9780802136572
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

As usual, the prose and the man

defy description. To know even slightly of either is to learn a new way to read, a closer way of listening. To learn to know a little of the laughing game through the veil of pain which is possible and too probable in life, a way of preserving the candle the twelfth hour and beyond, because communication exists. And always. I highly recommend this, as all his works, as a devotional to worldkind in general, and to the singular reader in particular. Enjoy the gift.