Catastrophic Bliss
By (author) Myronn Hardy
Publication date:
27 December 2012Length of book:
88 pagesPublisher
Bucknell University PressDimensions:
228x152mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781611484939
Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy’s third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.
“The only medicine is the voice,” Myronn Hardy tells us in his vivid and eloquent new collection of poems, Catastrophic Bliss, and what he tries to mend by speaking are the fractured cultures and landscapes that haunt contemporary consciousness. Hardy’s “voice” sings with fresh and arresting observations—“stingrays with pale/ undersides like hands”—and through them he explores the fragile co-existence of man and nature—the bliss of it and the catastrophe.