Since the first collection of poems appeared in 1972, George Amabile has quietly become one of our country’s most accomplished poets. Tasting the Dark presents a choice selection of his best work over the years and a substantial collection of his new poems. These are poems that open up and reach out, hungry to taste their fill of light as well as darkness, to taste grief and joy and rage and beauty — and to speak of it all with eloquent and sensuous precision. Selected poems include Amabile’s deeply moving and now famous elegy “Accidental Death,” the shocking childhood memoir “First Kill,” the complete suite of his lyrical “Anima” poems, and numerous other works. By turns funny, profound, and heartbreaking, this collection is hot with passion for life. The new poems collected here show Amabile at the height of his powers. Amabile observes his world with a combination of fierce wit and powerful tenderness, all shot through with magical imagery in the glass antlers of iced branches in winter, a child dancing to the music of a waterfall, a flock of red balloons cut loose by a machete.
News & Reviews
“A remarkable writer, Amabile provides us with a key to a larger understanding of the male ethos, something few male writers have attempted to do with such openness and honesty.” —Patrick Lane “Amabile is a well-established poet in firm possession of his own voice.” —Stephen Scobie “A confident polish, thoughtfulness, charm, consistency and a rare good sense.” —Kristjana Gunnars “Celebration and amazement are sustained by a harmonious balance of thought.” —Manuel de Jesus Valasquez Leon “Just as with Rembrandt’s self-portraits over the course of his painting career, so it is with Amabile: it is the continuity within change that is fascinating, the way a certain development could not actually have been predicted but, once there, feels natural, self-evident.” —Christopher Levenson “Amabile is a master.” —Uptown
About the Author
George Amabile has published his poetry, fiction and non-fiction in the USA, Canada, Europe, England, Wales, South America, Australia and New Zealand in over a hundred anthologies, magazines, journals and periodicals. He is the author of twelve books, and his poetry has won numerous awards including the CAA National Prize, the CBC Literary Competition, the Petra Kenney International Competition, the MAC national poetry contest, the Bressani award, and the National Magazine Awards. Operation Stealth Seed, his first novel, won the Michael von Rooy award for genre fiction. Amabile lives in Winnipeg.
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