Impenitent Notes

Name: Impenitent Notes
SKU: 4860
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Baron Wormser

$16.00

Wormser’s poetry is emphatically about people—how they do and do not accommodate themselves to the ever present hand of time. Whether following the life of a rock band through its various incarnations or imagining the meeting of Rilke and Babe Ruth or speaking to a mother who has lost her soldier son in Iraq, Wormser gets inside his characters’ hearts and minds.

Categories: All Books, Baron Wormser, Notable Voices, Poetry Tags: Baron Wormser, Impenitent Notes, notable voices

Meet the Author

BARON WORMSER is the author of eight books of poetry, a poetry chapbook, a memoir, a book of short stories and has co-authored two books about teaching poetry. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching held in Franconia, NH. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of Maine.

Critic Reviews

Baron Wormser’s incandescent, exacting, generous intelligence never allows him the luxury of detachment. Like all real subversion, his poetry hinges on responsibility. If there’s irony, it’s the irony of reality, of tragedy: the only animal that claims to know itself cannot save itself. Wormser can show you what’s inside those emotions—hope, desire—whose outsides have names. Behind the playfulness, formidable technique and erudition; behind that, a mind that does not compromise. IMPENITENT NOTES is essential work.
— D. Nurkse

Excerpt

Taxi

Sometimes they don’t want to talk.
You are full of good feeling—
On your way to a tryst or surrounded
By comforting packages or suffused
With the soft fiery lift of distilled spirits
But the driver spits at the motioning lights,
Twists the steering wheel petulantly.

Sometimes they do talk—their native realms.
They have fled famine, inquisition, decades doused in war.
They have fled barren women
And women who gave them children.
They have fled a threadbare shirt,
One pair of exhausted shoes
Yet amid the hard words are trees and flowers,
The buried scents of childhood beckoning.
Suddenly, right there in the cab, they mimic a bird—
Whit whit woo, whit whit woo.
You start,
Perhaps you should make sounds too.
Instead, you listen politely
Then explain where you are from.
In your backyard cardinals nest in the elderberries.

Sometimes they don’t want to talk,
So you read the driver’s name
But aren’t sure how to pronounce it.
There are too many vowels
Or there are marks over consonants that make no sense.
The man in the ID photo is not smiling.
You wish to imagine the grace of his joy
But the bruise of loss intrudes.

Sometimes they say that this
Is not what it’s like back home.
America has more cars, they say,
Many, many more new cars.
They lift their hands from the wheel for a second,
Gesture with them—palms up—to indicate how much
Yet never enough.