Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Robert Pack is one of America's most eminent nature poets, and his virtuoso talents are on glorious display in Still Here, Still Now, his nineteenth volume of verse. With styles ranging from lyric to narrative, and themes stretching from biblical concerns to meditations on contemporary science, Pack's poetry is composed in strongly rhythmic cadences and a diction that is direct and accessible. In four different sections of thematically and stylistically divergent verse, Still Here, Still Now delivers many of the elements of Pack's poetry readers have come to admire and expect-both the humorous and the elegiac. The first section of the book contains traditional lyrics that celebrate family ties and seek consolations for the passing of personal and evolutionary time. The poems in this group address a named or unnamed auditor in a voice of intimate engagement. Featuring the most narrative selections in the book, the second section consists of fable-like stories, rich with innuendo and implication. The characters in these poems make choices that press against the events and circumstances that challenge and define them. Embodying what Harold Bloom has called Pack's "courage to surmount suffering," the poems of the third section are largely devoted to biblical themes and philosophical speculations on the meaning of happiness and the uses of suffering. Here, Pack's empathy for the human condition as well as his forebodings about the prospect of human survival are on poignant display. The final section of the book turns to Pack's abiding interest in landscape and the ways in which the place one inhabits contains and animates our individual lives. Ripe with many years, Pack remains a vital presence in American letters. Still Here, Still Now is an affecting and graceful addition to the oeuvre of a poet whose compelling and distinct voice will continue to resonate among his loyal readers.

Families --- Happiness --- Suffering --- Nature --- Affliction --- Masochism --- Pain --- Gladness --- Emotions --- Cheerfulness --- Contentment --- Pleasure --- Well-being --- poetry, collection, literature, nature, creative writing, religion, bible, allusion, lyric, narrative, science, family, time, loss, longing, love, community, belonging, connection, romance, sexuality, innuendo, suffering, pain, grief, happiness, landscape, consumption, conservation, resources, war, animals, wilderness, spring, renewal, hope, faith, challenges, obstacles, overcoming.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

One of America's most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, Laughter Before Sleep, Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music. Laughter Before Sleep weighs the nature of endings from the perspective of old age and embraces the humor and play of memory that keep mortality at bay. As we are carried along with Pack's lyrical, sensitive, and intelligent verse, he takes us on a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life. In the opening section, Pack composes poems that meditate upon a sense of his own diminishing and the meaning of absences. The middle sections form episodes of a memoir in verse, moving from family to history and back again, reflecting on the power of anecdote to shape a life in retrospect. With the final section, Pack recalls his unfulfilled plan to raise penguins in Montana, offers a panegyric on Darwin's nose, and makes the mistake of trying to impress a police officer with a book of poems. Filled with charm and wit but also with philosophical melancholy, Laughter Before Sleep is a superb addition to the poet's oeuvre.

Grief --- Nature --- nature, wilderness, endings, mortality, death, loss, grief, time, healing, pain, suffering, love, meaning, purpose, poetry, collection, creative writing, contemporary, literature, music, art, consolation, happiness, fragility, precocity, transience, diversity, evolution, natural world, environment, environmentalism, responsibility, family, friends, aging, humor, memory, reminiscence, looking back, absence, memoir, retrospect.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

from "Clayfeld's Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack" Beneath this mellow harvest moon, I can still picture you-a boy content just fishing with his father from a ledge above a foaming stream. The flailing trout you caught is packed in gleaming ice; the pink stripe all along its side is smeared across black shiny dots that seem to shine with their own light. I'm sure that you can picture me with equal vividness, and though we're not identical, there is a sense in which I am inventing you as much as you're inventing me. In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack's doppelgänger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self. Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld's formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.

American poetry

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Appraisal of books --- Boeken en lectuur --- Boeken--Keuze --- Boeken--Publiek --- Boekenkeuze --- Books and reading --- Books--Appraisal --- Choice of books --- Choix de livres --- Evaluation of literature --- Literature--Evaluation --- Livres et lecture --- Livres--Choix --- Livres--Public --- Reading [Choice of ] --- Reading and books --- Reading habits --- Reading public --- American poetry --- History and criticism --- English poetry

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)