A vision of the city, the hubris of its tower, the division of its tongues, and its salvation through love.
My new book, Tower & City (2024), is now available on Amazon, in ebook and paperback.
This is my fourth book, and has some of my best poems, including a sequence of love sonnets, “Solomon’s Sonnets,” and a longer piece, “Calypso,” a modern retelling of Odysseus and Calypso in the style of Wallace Stevens. Other influences include Eliot, HD, and Williams. It’s a thoroughly “modernist” book, that also borrows much from the wisdom books of the Bible.
The work takes the form of various voices. Below is an excerpt from “The Narrator.”
'They too are on their way to astonishment...'
congrats!
Great poem, Robert. I like how in the middle of the poem the tower takes on such weight. It is like the gravity of human endeavour is becoming apparent and is something we carry with us. To me, towards the end, the poem seems to say that we are driven to build higher and higher to escape the weight of our own history.