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Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter “The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” which is, well—surreal, and features a decisively modern, entirely notional score, sung by an inventor and his invention, which (who?) turns out to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) somehow knows all the words to the song you never knew you had in you. The daring of this collection is not in replaying the fractured polyphony of our moment. Speculative Music gives us accessible lyrics that still manage to listen in on our echoing interiors. These are poems that promise Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” and, at the same time, provoke a deep, head-shaking wonder.
Price: $17.95
Pages: 64
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Imprint: Sarabande Books
Publication Date:
02 July 2013
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781936747580
Format: Paperback
“Here is a surprising new poet.... In a time when every other poet seems to have an extraliterary agenda, Dolven rather old-fashionedly makes poetry out of words and their implications, as if he were some Elizabethan sonneteer as or more intent on delight than passion, on thought than emotion. Well, delightful he is—smart, too.” —Booklist, starred review
"If these poems are hands, and these hands move within us—their readers, their puppets—they are sleight of hands, conjuring a deep cavern beyond their spare proscenia. As though through a distorting glass, Speculative Music’s slant untruths only focus more acutely the poems’ profound yearnings. Goethe would recognize a cousin!" —Susan Wheeler
“In Speculative Music, Jeff Dolven takes up the great and rare project of "inventio": these poems are imaginative discoveries, beautiful contraptions. A music-hall sprightliness barely cloaks "the querying steel" flashing throughout. The command and dash here at times might remind you of Auden, but Dolven is his own (split) man. Here is the world, askew. Here is a poet who can indeed “string a string . . . through everything.”” —Maureen McLane
"It's the kind of book where you want to call up a friend and say, listen to this, listen to his other one, whatever is he going to do next? Utterly original, within the poem leaping like a mountain goat from one change of meaning to another of some word or homonym the poem obsesses on. He can tell you that the humming bird hums because it doesn't know the words, and that on the phone it's neither hear nor there, and hello, hello, am I still here? All by means of an extremely adept prosody, always always alive. Sometimes (rather cheerfully ) despairing, sometime coolly objective, always sympathetic to who he is and who we are, and amused by all of us. It's a delight. More than a delight. But it's a delight." —David Ferry
"If these poems are hands, and these hands move within us—their readers, their puppets—they are sleight of hands, conjuring a deep cavern beyond their spare proscenia. As though through a distorting glass, Speculative Music’s slant untruths only focus more acutely the poems’ profound yearnings. Goethe would recognize a cousin!" —Susan Wheeler
“In Speculative Music, Jeff Dolven takes up the great and rare project of "inventio": these poems are imaginative discoveries, beautiful contraptions. A music-hall sprightliness barely cloaks "the querying steel" flashing throughout. The command and dash here at times might remind you of Auden, but Dolven is his own (split) man. Here is the world, askew. Here is a poet who can indeed “string a string . . . through everything.”” —Maureen McLane
"It's the kind of book where you want to call up a friend and say, listen to this, listen to his other one, whatever is he going to do next? Utterly original, within the poem leaping like a mountain goat from one change of meaning to another of some word or homonym the poem obsesses on. He can tell you that the humming bird hums because it doesn't know the words, and that on the phone it's neither hear nor there, and hello, hello, am I still here? All by means of an extremely adept prosody, always always alive. Sometimes (rather cheerfully ) despairing, sometime coolly objective, always sympathetic to who he is and who we are, and amused by all of us. It's a delight. More than a delight. But it's a delight." —David Ferry
Jeff Dolven grew up in Massachusetts and studied at Yale and Oxford. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Speculative Music is his first collection. He teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University, and is an editor at large at Cabinet magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.
How Do You Do
Folding Star
Frigidaire
The Whale-Road
This Is a City of Bridges
A Brief Life of Hermogenes
Morning Czar and Evening Tsar
Cantaloupe
You've Been Dry
Faith and Hope
Rituals
Horse Lessons
My Puppets
Peach Bone
The Labor Theory of Value
Shame School
The Force of Precedent
Quarter
How the Fire Feels
Alcibiades' Waltz
The Dressing Room
Strawberries and Cream
After Work
Sometimes I Smile
Relax, Relax
The Invention
Splinter
Humming Bird
Singing to Yourself
Here's the Thing
Humilitas
I Taught Myself
Appendix
Exile
Blazon
Dichten = Condensure
Someone Left the Bed Ajar
It's Raining
Symmetry
Snow Apple
Folding Star
Frigidaire
The Whale-Road
This Is a City of Bridges
A Brief Life of Hermogenes
Morning Czar and Evening Tsar
Cantaloupe
You've Been Dry
Faith and Hope
Rituals
Horse Lessons
My Puppets
Peach Bone
The Labor Theory of Value
Shame School
The Force of Precedent
Quarter
How the Fire Feels
Alcibiades' Waltz
The Dressing Room
Strawberries and Cream
After Work
Sometimes I Smile
Relax, Relax
The Invention
Splinter
Humming Bird
Singing to Yourself
Here's the Thing
Humilitas
I Taught Myself
Appendix
Exile
Blazon
Dichten = Condensure
Someone Left the Bed Ajar
It's Raining
Symmetry
Snow Apple