Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995

By Michael Palmer

Book Overview

The Lion Bridge, Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer's extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly avant-garde, Palmer's work has a matchless beauty, difficult to describe: as Common Knowledge remarked, "Even more than its music, it emanates silence." The poet himself has culled the 118 poems of The Lion Bridge from his great body of work. This generous chronological selection includes individual poems, selections from serial poems, and two complete serial poems. Together the poems form a bridge, a kind of work-biography which takes a long look at an extraordinary achievement and gives a new view of a body of work as the poet himself wishes it to be seen. It also rescues from limbo so much material that has gone out of print. The Lion Bridge presents work from seven of his books: Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and At Passages.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811213838
• ISBN13: 9780811213837
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Michael Palmer is brilliant

As something of a freelance poet, Michael Palmer is someone I've turned to for inspiration. I don't know any pseudo-intellectual words to describe it, but his manipulation of words and ability to touch people with even really abstract work astounds me. He moves me. For an example of some of the brilliant work in this collection, try looking at "The Sun" online. (...)P.S. Who is the moron that copied and pasted rave reviews but didn't star them? It really deflated the score.

irreplaceable avant-garde modern poet

Michael Palmer's poetry is so unique, & always unsparingly brilliant. This might be the most important book of his career, since it collects so much essential poetry he wrote over such a long period of time, such a major proportion of his life. He's done a lot more different things in his poetry since this book, & in the time span this selection covers. But this book is so important to get to know Michael Palmer, & what he's done to 20th & 21st century poetry.