Ausable Press: Interglacial, New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms

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This volume contains Richardson’s newest book, Interglacial, as well as a generous retrospective of his previous five, several of which have been out of print for years. Although his diction and musical ear are clearly contemporary and American, Richardson’s sensibility is both lyric (in the classical sense) and philosophical, bringing to mind poets as dissimilar as Wallace Stevens and the Romantics. He has been praised for his fierce and probing intelligence, his inventive syntax (which Thomas Lux has described as “a gorgeous surge and pull in his sentences”), and his subtle and formally tensile music. This book will establish Richardson as one of our most accomplished, ambitious, and necessary poets.

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

"James Richardson's Interglacial offers a generous selection of the work of one of America's most distinctive contemporary poets, though one who is still little known. What makes the book especially satisfying is the way in which it shows Richardson's poetic resources steadily expanding and deepening, while remaining in the service of a set of themes and attitudes that are uniquely his own. Most conspicuous among these is a pervasive and powerful interiority. It is a cliche of commentary that contemporary American poetry is overly inward, but what passes for inwardness in much current writing is the absence of any real conviction of motivation beyond a generic awareness of the writing self. Richardson's interiority is something else altogether, an inescapable condition of being that has the feel and force of a metaphysical necessity…. Richardson's poetry, finally, is fragmentary and disjunctive—even at its most discursive, it so often presents an accumulation of miniatures not governed by consecutive argument or syntax. James Longenbach has drawn a useful distinction between "wet" and "dry" disjunctive poetry, the former characterized by an aura of affect and feeling that the latter eschews. Richardson's disjunctiveness is the wet kind: the ruptured clauses, the illogic, the transitions, the fragments, the reversals and inversions are thoroughly disruptive, yet the principle of composition is always that of the musical cadence. The result is a powerful and moving body of work that in its intimacy and philosophical naturalism is unique in contemporary American poetry." —John Koethe, Boston Review

"James Richardson's Interglacial, a poetry finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is like a beautiful river, under the thin surface of which rushes an intensely felt life and a never quite lost yearning to belong. These poems are uncomfortable with comfort, and gravitate toward the chill familiarities of loss. Like a river's banks, this verse is shaped by erosion, by absence and loss and things borne away. And yet what is revealed by the process of attrition is a thing of lasting loveliness…. For Richardson, whose "inner land" is November, the disappointments of a finite lifetime are soul making; the ravishing compensations of loneliness are the landmarks by which he knows the world and its munificence." —Ann Stapleton, NewPages

"This feast of a book offers a retrospective from James Richardson's past five collections, concluding with his latest, Interglacial. Together, the poems reveal the lyrical unfurling of an alert life. Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton, Richardson's recent work includes "Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays"—mischievious, sometimes wistful poems, each only a line or two long, deceptively simple as a Zen koan, and rich as a reduction sauce. When we writes of "the way we hear under white ice the toiling waters,/the way we are/characters in two different novels/meeting in what reader,/the way you feel/your hands pressed flat, the snow/ticking and streaming on the warm-cold window," the risks and awe of human life mingle in one stanza." —Melanie Drane, ForeWord

"Since 1977, James Richardson has published books of poems that are independent of fads and fashions. Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms does what midcareer summaries are supposed to do: demonstrates early promise, development, and new direction (sixty pages of new work is enough to fill its own slim volume). In short lyrics, one-liners, and long multi-part poems, Richardson is concerned with what's in front of him: things in themselves, the life he's living. His treatment is economical and direct; these are poems of rigorous observation. Yet he's always got an oblique angle, a kind of bent thinking. Interglacial is unusual, quirky, personal, and profound. It ought to bring this first-rate poet the recognition he deserves." —Daisy Fried, The Threepenny Review

"These new and selected poems and aphorisms trace the evolution of a poet who earned his reputation as a master of imagery and concision. Richardson's early works are like small pieces of stained glass, carefully cut and polished…. Over time, however, Richardson shifts from tight, tiny gems to slightly looser poems, and then to aphorisms. This allows him to try various approaches and voices, and to explore larger concepts…." —The Christian Science Monitor

"Interglacial feels like the life's work of a man who took what Frost called "the road less traveled"—the long way indeed—and made sure to take darn good notes along the way. Read it for its awful beauty." —John Freeman, The Hartford Courant

“James Richardson’s earlier books of poetry and several elegant volumes of literary criticism exhibited a finesse, a delicacy, rarely met with in his generation…. If we add to wit and intelligence, remindful of the Metaphysicals, a dash of Rilkean subtlety and insinuatingness, we should have something like a sense of Richardson’s accomplishment. Certainly his work establishes him as one of the poets this time is lucky to have.”
—Theodore Weiss

“…There’s a broad, probing, unusual intelligence in [Richardson’s] work, an unusual kind of technical introspection and a wide-ranging inspiration and content that use as their matter images and ideas from sources as far afield as ancient philosophy, and contemporary science and philosophy…. it is work that brings news to us of packets of mental and emotional experience that haven’t sung so well together in poetry for a longer time than one would care to think.” —C.K. Williams