- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: House of Anansi Press (May 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0887846580
- ISBN-13: 978-0887846588
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.5 x 1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 68 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #324,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
After much anticipation and many accolades for Ken Babstock's first poetry collection, Mean, patience is rewarded, two years later, with the appearance of his second, Days into Flatspin. Babstock is an impressive and confident young poet, writing on topics ranging from drunken fistfights and rural cooking techniques to stolen bicycles and clothespins. In "Carrying someone else's infant past a cow in a field near Marmosa, Ont.," he is able to supply new descriptions of things as familiar (to some of us) as children and cows, writing "Summer gnats colonized her molasses black eyes, her flicking, / conical ears. She moaned, a badly tuned / tuba, and tassels of ick dripped / from her black- // on-pink nostrils like strings of weed sap." In poems on human and animal experiences, wounds and sufferings large and small, Babstock writes heartfelt and hard-lived poems with lines so beautiful, punched in the gut, they glow, writing of "garter snakes // playing wet grass blades with cadmium scales," or "light nodes pinging off the Rideau Canal." He knows how to weigh the language with rich tones, and he knows what the physicality of the world means, when given true speech. --Rob McLennan
Book Description
Days into Flatspin is Ken Babstock's extraordinary second collection and it reveals a poet in full flight, fearless and technically brilliant.
Diving into and then beyond what is seen or "the coma of looking" as one poem calls it, Babstock veers into the inner core of things, animals, and places through portals that exist all around us — clothing, banisters, marshes, locks, wounds. And these are always entry points, always a means by which to go forward and further into, forcing decisions about whether to continue on or retreat and revealing that we rarely have any choice at all.
Babstock opens everything to investigation, rupturing the limitations of the eye and the strictures of the poetic form: a sonnet is built from a Frisbee game, a love poem inspired by a cow, a gash inhabited by a field of crickets. And throughout his poetic landscape is a solitary bird — watching, passing overhead, biding time, always present. Days into Flatspin is a soaring collection.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Accomplished Second Book from Dynamic Poet,
By
This review is from: Days Into Flatspin (Paperback)
Ken Babstock is one of the best young poets emerging in Canada, and his second book shows a real honing of his skills. His language is complicated, but full of humor, and he is equally at home writing about Nietzsche and bottled rabbit. His poem, "His Domestic Pleasures Song" was making the rounds on the Toronto subway system, and it's as good a domestic love poem as anyone has written this century. Here's hoping his work makes it across the border, because it deserves a wider readership than Canada can provide alone.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Accomplished Second Book from Dynamic Poet,
By A. Sol - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Days Into Flatspin (Paperback)
Ken Babstock is one of the best young poets emerging in Canada, and his second book shows a real honing of his skills. His language is complicated, but full of humor, and he is equally at home writing about Nietzsche and bottled rabbit. His poem, "His Domestic Pleasures Song" was making the rounds on the Toronto subway system, and it's as good a domestic love poem as anyone has written this century. Here's hoping his work makes it across the border, because it deserves a wider readership than Canada can provide alone.
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