Ellendea Proffer

David Rigsbee

The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry

Poetry. "Another name for this book could be The Museum of Life As We Know It Today. From public figures like Mishima and Nixon, from musicians like Frankie Avalon and Roy Orbison, as well as the Cure and the Everly Brothers, Rigsbee walks us through our past and present even as he points us toward the future. The world that awaits will be a beautiful one as long as it contains poets and poems like these."--David Kirby "For decades now, David Rigsbee has crafted poems of a bracing lyrical intensity that is both refined and tough-minded. His new collection shows him working at the height of his considerable powers: these are poems of heartfelt retrospection and surprising associations. Above all, they celebrate the blessings and consolations of a cultured life, one that can honor Auden and Roy Orbison, Faust and one-hit Doo Wop groups. These elegant and lovingly constructed poems deserve to be read and--more importantly--reread." --David Wojahn

This Much I Can Tell You

Analyzes Joseph Brodsky's key elegies and the role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics.

Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy

Styles of Ruin

John Kessel

Margaret Maron

Kelly Starling Lyons

Scott Huler

Elaine Neil Orr

Angela Davis-Gardner

G.D. Gearino

Bridgette A. Lacy

Andrea Weigl

27 VIEWS of RALEIGH: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry features the work of twenty-seven (plus two) Raleighites who create a literary montage of North Carolina's capital city in fiction, essays, and poetry. Novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and even a science fiction writer capture the city in a variety of genres—spanning neighborhoods, generations, cultural and racial experiences, historic eras—reflecting the social, historic, and creative fabric of Raleigh. As Wilton Barnhardt writes in the book's introduction, “We seem to have flourished not because we have solved all the problems of the New South, despite leading the way now and again, but because we the citizens of Raleigh decided to be erudite, cultured, enriched, and entertained . . ."

The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry

27 Views of Raleigh

David Rigsbees poems focus on the relationship between memory and place, self and other, and history and story. The poems record not only the fact that events and experiences bring us to loss, to the Adamic vastnesses, but that their transformation into memory can also uncover occasions for redemptive hope. Rigsbees poemsintensely felt, formally rigorousare grounded in the South and in generations of family. They move through suicide, disease, survival and dementia to the spreading loam of racism, spiritual erosion, and permanently deferred dreams; from the hardscrabble seasons and their too-brief flowerings, to empathy suspended elegiacally over loss, shaping the climate of felt life.

New & Selected Poems

The Red Tower

David Rigsbee

Books

Your next favorite book is out there