Bryan Walpert, a senior
lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, will be
launching his second collection of poetry, A
History of Glass, Wednesday 11 April in Palmerston North. Come for
drinks and nibbles at Bruce McKenzie's Bookstore, 6:30 p.m., followed by a
reading at the Palmerston North City Library at 7 p.m.
The
ostensible subjects in Bryan Walpert’s second collection of poetry—a finalist
in the Stephen F. Austin State University Press (U.S.) manuscript award—are as
varied as wildflowers and rivers, the Big Bang and cosmic dust, and, as
signaled by the title, an assortment of windows, a collection of shot glasses,
a glass blower. But if “sometimes windows / are just windows” as Walpert
insists at one point, things are in fact rarely as they appear in these poems:
beneath their tempered surfaces lie meditations on the fragility of love, the
delicate history of loss, the slimmest of barriers behind which we so often
remain at one remove, a “narrative of containment.” For all their seeming
accessibility, the poems are as often translucent as transparent, offering once
again—as Landfall
described Walpert’s first collection—a masterful set of linguistic trapdoors,
rhetorical sleights of hand, and conjuring tricks with language.
“The poems in A History of Glass are some of the best
I have read in years. In these thoughtful, soulful poems every reflection is
earned. And they are voyages–Walpert has a natural narrative voice that works
through lovingly observed overlapping images, gently pulling the reader into a
shared, spiritually rewarding journey. One could not ask for more of poetry.” —
Roald Hoffmann, Nobel-winning chemist and author of Soliton: Poems.
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