Book description
Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career
to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are
devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies
and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary,
everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately
deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its
ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that
the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it
is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were
translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers,
and translators, including John Ashbery, D. J. Enright, and Douglas
Dunn. "If you admire the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and especially
Wislawa Szymborska, seek out Piotr Sommer. Based on Continued, ...Sommer
deserves a place alongside these philosophically alert Polish
poets."--John Taylor, Antioch Review PIOTR SOMMER is a poet and
translator of English, Irish, and American poetry. He is the author of
eight books of poetry, including one in English, Things to Translate
(1991), and two books of essays. Sommer lives outside Warsaw and works
for a magazine of international writing. AUGUST KLEINZAHLER is a
widely-published poet whose most recent book is The Strange Hours
Travelers Keep (2003).
