A View of Buildings and Water

In A View of Buildings and Water Geoffrey O'Brien collects poetry from the last half-decade, among them poems that first appeared in such magazines as Talisman, The Germ, The Literary Review, and New American Writing, and including a number of long sequences that have not appeared anywhere in their complete form. These poems extend a concern with mapping the geographies of dream, fantasy, and intuited history, and with finding a music that might realize those spaces in a flexible, responsive measure. In form the poems range from a monologue from an unmade film noir to a sonic sculpture where sense is made to follow where sounds lead. In "Heads in Limbo" a varied cast of characters is epitomized in a series of epitaph-like three-line poems. Central to the book is a cycle of five poems exploring the stages of grief against a shifting background of terrains both real and phantasmagoric. The book's narratives-slippery, splintered, referring back to lost earlier chronicles-take their form from the mythmaking of ordinary life, the stories partly found and partly invented out of which we try to forge a connection to what has vanished and what has not yet arrived.