| The
Fire Landscape
Poems by Gary Fincke
Coming
of age in post-fifties America
“Gary
Fincke writes a poetry of abiding generosity, of true feeling
and thought. His is an essential American voice.”
—Rodney
Jones
The
Fire Landscape is a series of poem sequences that chronicle
a wide variety of coming-of-age moments from childhood in
the 1950s through the beginning of the 21st century. These
deeply layered, complex narrative poems are connected by close
personal observation of place and time but also by the politics
of the Cold War and its aftermath, including a sequence driven
by the May 4, 1970, shooting of students by the National Guard
at Kent State where Gary Fincke was a student at the time.
Although set in the recent past, these poems, through the
multiple layering of their imagery, avoid nostalgia, achieving,
instead, the tremendous density that comes from surprising
association.
As Fincke
says about the Kent State killings in “History Bites”:
“We thought they were blanks; we stood ignorant
As
some lost tribe staring at sticks that smoked.
Which is the way these histories happen,
Somebody saying ‘Never,’ ‘Of course not,’
Or its thousand variants. The crowd scene
That follows, the jostling forward of trust.”
“The Fire Landscape is an eloquent addition
to a masterful body of work by one of our best multi-genre
writers.”
—Michael Waters, author of Darling Vulgarity
“No one is better than Gary Fincke at locating grand
gestures inside the fragile details that make up a life. .
. . The old dangers, the old fears, rise before us with radioactive
language and an exactness of phrase, of line, that feels like
catechism.”
—Fleda Brown, author of Reunion
“[A] remarkable series of poetic sequences . . . a bildungsroman
for a generation that grew up watching the horizon for a different
glow, the almost-wished-for atomic bomb. Few poets have so
unnervingly located the personal at the imploding heart of
a particular historical epoch.”
—James Harms, author of After West
Gary Fincke is professor of English and creative
writing at Susquehenna University. He has published nineteen
books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction. Standing
Around the Heart (University of Arkansas Press) was
a finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. Sorry I
Worried You won the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Prize
for Short Fiction. The Canals of Mars: A Memoir will
be published this year.
July
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 104 pages
$16.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-881-3 | 1-55728-881-X
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