HORSES ON DRUMS
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
When Jackson Pollock said, “Painting is a state of being,” perhaps he spoke to the future of art and to the poetry of Lawrence Bridges. Read Horses on Drums and you’ll soon agree, “This month’s been like no other culture.” Time haunts its own distance inside a world full of episodic discord and upended images, compelled and compelled to find, indeed, “the syntax is circular.” Aphoristic, strange, funny, indissoluble, this stunning first book offers a taste of Simic, of Holub, something savoring Tarkovsky’s lyrical hero “To blaze, word-like” inside our mouths. This is a poetry, vivid with entropy, that turns in on itself, as if action is elucidation-backwards, and reveals, from the deep pockets of the poet, an unspent currency of fresh verve and revelation, of sadness and awakened consciousness. The answer is a present-tense yes: “Don’t you know time will meet the same dog over and over?” —Elena Karina Byrne
$17.95
FLIP DAYS
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems. An unnamed protagonist is torn from a lover, torn from himself, in perpetual transition while starting a new family, surrounded by a lively array of colleagues and friends as his career implodes, asserting his autonomy only to become part of life's "conspiracies." Strangers shift around him in a murky world beyond his control, a world with signs of indeterminacy and happenstance: Restaurant patrons smile innocently while thieves quietly rob, a death pact is used to escape a lover, disguised signals from space aliens announce that our enemies are now their allies. How do you tie up loose ends when characters we like are actually the bad guys? Bridges prods us to answer the main question: Can a man love as his world spells farewell? A unique, delightful read—an invitation to explore something new in what may be a new genre fusing some of the elements of screenplay with poetry. Today is already yesterday to tomorrow, in Flip Days.
Cynthia Ozick on Lawrence Bridges and the school of Dissociative Poets:
Dissociative Poet! Dis-sociative?! - when the ruling motif is precisely the opposite, when what we are struck by, again and again and again is the intuitive wizardry of lightening associations, association, junctions, segues, startling linkages that make you see as you've never seen before and think as you've never thought before! As feel as you've never felt before. And very often jump out of you skin! "Our profiles are what make us look strange." There is pure lyricism, the beautiful "Winter Object: Oath of Silence," wherein the images are Yeatslike. Elsewhere, this lovely phrase" "All the cells want to be flowers." All the cells want to be flowers. Oh, to have written that!” -Cynthia Ozick
$17.95
BROWNWOOD
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
SAMPLE FROM BROWNWOOD
UNDERTOW
This hand's shadow plays over the page. I drag my left hand against
it in the dark--- this hand moves down music, the memory of sex, darker
flowers, over riverbed of green, over things unsaid concealed in song,
allowing no reply like a light left on all week. A bird lands on the fountain.
I build it a wing. I make something simple, then rest in the winging-it
heart, I confess, in the only language I know, building new wing version
on the way down. The music I distrust stirs my inner fool.
$11.14
Brownwood, like Berryman's Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an "other" character, constructed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist's identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, "Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he's a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book's poetic plot . . . arrives with cinematographic aplomb." Bridges's third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: "Feared as a monster, tame as a clown."