conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Elegy Owed about Words, Avoiding, Knockturn with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry.. Start with the sentence 'Words have weight in the authors poems'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Words have weight in the authors poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, the author evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, the author builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension (one particularly teasing poem is titled Knockturn), he cleaves to earth, skin, breath. He describes odd, private rituals involving attempts to reassemble shards and stop time. His variations on the elegy can be haunting, romantic, and bracingly irreverent. Elegy to hunger begins, Theres a strain of cannibalism / I admire. Intimate lyrics of love, fear, loss, and cosmic perplexity are matched by robust dissections and protests. the authors mordant view of our doomed consumer culture in Obituary for the middle class is balanced by his gruffly tender objection to the word inanimate, Steels got a pulse / as far as Im concerned. This trenchant collections got heart and soul. --Donna Seaman