Blind Rain : Poems

In his newest collection, BLIND RAIN, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time. Bond opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which consoles paradoxically, since it is a form of loss itself. The work includes a long meditation, "The Return," that hinges on the double sense of the word "true" as suggesting both "the real" and "the loyal," and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a postmodern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the world at hand.

Bruce Bond is professor of English at University of North Texas.