About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

ISBN-100151006660

ISBN-139780151006663

eBay Product ID (ePID)1972867

Product Key Features

Book TitleHoly Worm of Praise : Poems

Number of Pages112 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicGeneral

Publication Year2002

GenrePoetry

AuthorPhilip Schultz

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight10.6 Oz

Item Length8.2 in

Item Width5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2001-003905

Dewey Edition21

ReviewsSchultz writes carefully and deliberately, and the time he dedicated to every line of these poems shows. Each monologue presents a delightful character, a fully developed, ironic voice reminiscent of Louis Simpson or, at times, Richard Howard. This distinctive voice maintains a necessary distance between fiction and the poet's experience. While poems that recount the trials of the poet can be tedious, Schultz never takes himself too seriously, writing in a prose poem about "doing perhaps / what you do best, being so soulful and sensitive and all that...." Schultz doesn't presume to have simple answers, but he can be depended upon to ask all the important questions. , The poems in Schultz's new work his first in 15 years are prayerful, nostalgic, and elegiac in tone, the poignant record of a man escaping "the white noise of self-loathing and boomerang of self-pity." Out of his grieving for dead friends and his mother's Alzheimer's, the poet discovers spiritual peace and a capacity for love and joy, causing the "holy worm" of his tongue to sing "praise." At times, Schultz shifts into a comic surrealism, as in "Flying Dogs," where the canines "boogie-woogie" and "feel the city on their paws." He can even become hilariously funny, as in "Ars Poetica," where, on a book promotion tour, he misplaces his manuscript and appears at his reading with a leather-bound wine list. Schultz summarizes his hard-earned wisdom thus: "consider forgiveness" and "live without syntax/ or wings." This is easily one of the strongest collections of lyrics published in the last decade. Highly endorsed for all collections. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL Religion Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. , PRAISE FOR PHILIP SCHULTZ "Philip Schultz is a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation, full of slashing language, good rhythms, surprises, and the power to leave you meditating in the cave of his poems."--Norman Mailer "A master at transmuting the rhythms of contemporary speech, and at combining them with his own haunting original music."--Grace Schulman, His first in 15 years, Schultz's third collection of poems confirms this poet's calling as an elegist, whether remembering his mother ("Apartment Sale," "Nomads," "Stories"), his father ("Mr. Parsky"), or writers like Yehuda Amichai, Joseph Brodsky, John Cheever and William Dickey. The long poem that concludes the book, "Souls Over Harlem," provides a stark account of a friend who "parked on a cliff in the cold wind of the Pacific and stuck his mulatto face in a plastic bag and drank snail poison, and burned his intestines to an ash transparency." Over the course of the poem, Schultz's guilt over not being able to save his friend is interwoven with his diffidence over the gap between his lifestyle as a Hampton-izing New Yorker and the plight of so many inner-city Blacks in Harlem. The frisson of better city living is sent up in the ode "City Dogs," with "fancy over-fluffed pedigrees prattling toward pedicures, Saturday afternoon perambulations in Village runs." Schultz has tendencies toward poems that read like lineated prose ("My Friend Is Making Himself," "The Answering Machine," "Ars Poetica," "Personally") and an excessive use of weak similes, as in this schmaltzy passage from "Change," a poem that incorporates over a dozen: "Surely you've never tasted it before, lavender, like lilacs on the first fine day of May, the happiest of seasons. Now your heart is thumping like a tail." Schultz is at his best in the gritty voice of a "Prison Doctor," who bears witness to this world in all its woundedness where gold teeth are "sliced out of sleeping mouths for trophy earrings, all paranoia's graffiti pleading Doc please yank this sardine-can shaft, this mea culpa, out of my memory." Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Decimal811/.54

Table Of ContentPART 1 The Holy Worm of Praise My Friend Is Making Himself Change A Woman's Touch Epithalamion Courtship According to My Guardian Angel Stein Flying Dogs City Dogs Marking On First Hearing of Your Conception PART 2 The Monologue Solitaire Sick Disintegration The Inside and The Outside The Nutritive Values The Answering Machine The front left window TV Series Ars Poetica Juror's Manual Three Conversations Overheard in the Summer of 1994 On the corner Personally The Extra The Stuntman Prison Doctor PART 3 The Dead In Medias Res The Displaced The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem I Remember Alzheimer's Apartment Sale Nomads Stories Darwin, Sweeping The Eight-Mile Bike Ride The Silence Mr. McGuire The Dalai Lama To William Dickey Stein, Good-bye The dark between Mr. Parsky PART 4 Souls Over Harlem Acknowledgments

Synopsiso New York Author Appearances o National Publicity Campaigno Poetry Month Promotiono Academic Marketing Campaigno Online Publicity Campaign

LC Classification NumberPS3569.C5533H6 2002