Against Romance: Poems

Poetry. A reprinted edition of the celebrated 1987 Penguin edition (a collection) by the 1985 winner of the Academy of American Poets Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award. "Blumenthal's new collection moves surely through the contradictions implied by its title. Belonging to the "central" modernist tradition of Wallace Stevens and informed by both wit and intelligence, the poems take us through a variety of topics and moods without losing sight of the book's pivotal experience, a divorce. Urbane, sophisticated, sometimes self-deprecatory, Blumenthal sustains an observant distance, which only emphasizes the romantic yearning underlying the book's theme. The best poems work well, arching toward an ethereal, metaphysical tone, as in these lines from the title poem: "and when life turns its dimmed lights up/ once again and the theater empties,/ they find the stranger love always delivers up." Other poems feel like exercises, but Blumenthal's voice is growing more authentic"--Library Journal.

Michael Blumenthal is the author, most recently, of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999), his sixth book of poems. His novel Weinstock Among the Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction in l994, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in l998. He has lived at taught at universities in Hungary, Israel, Germany and France, mostly as a Fulbright Fellow. In 2004-2005, he held the Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University, and in 2006-07 he will hold the Darden Endowed Chair at Old Dominion University. He spends his summers in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary.