The second volume in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Complete Poems series, covering his early years as a professional poet, from 1967-1976, contains more than eight hundred chronologically arranged pieces. This body of work shows Brodsky developing a number of artistic strategies to record the life he chose outside the realm of academia, which he abandoned after complete his master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1968. --Time Being Books.
Tracing the days of the writer edging into middle age, the 888 poems presented in volume four of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky offer a glimpse into the frenzied life of a man compelled, by his discipline and inner passion, to capture the elements of his existence and explode them upon the page ... Startlingly honest and bristling with the energy of Brodsky's discontent, this book records the poet gaining momentum, as a writer, even as his personal life spirals out of control. --Time Being Books.
A Transcendental Almanac takes you through a one-year span of the seasons, inviting you to linger in each month's four poems. Beginning in April, with nature exultantly proclaiming its freedom from hibernation, and ending, the following March, after the cyclical passing of summer, autumn, and winter, the book evokes an intimacy with the flora and fauna, the life and essence, of the world's elemental existence.
Poetry. The second and third years of a child's life are filled with the extraordinary ordinary events that are steppingstone rites of passage: learning to walk and speak; reveling in play and mischief; enduring the travails of illness; growing familiar with the world beyond the house, where dogs, rabbits, and fireflies mesmerize curious eyes; taking part in adventures with mom and dad--vacations, holidays, visits to grandparents. In this second book of a five-volume series about his children, Louis Daniel Brodsky chronicles the progress of his daughter, as she grows by leaps and bounds, and the evolution of his family, which is soon to grow as well, with the birth of a second child.
In Peddler on the Road: Days in the Life of Willy Sypher, Louis Daniel Brodsky sets forth a series of poetic vignettes about one Jewish traveling salesman's journeys as a representative for a major Midwest manufacturer of men's dress clothing, depicting the odyssey of a fifty-year career devoted to the road and to the small towns that define it.
Combing Florida's Shores is a poetic memoir. Part one depicts a man, his wife, and their girl and boy reveling in the joys of vacationing in Fort Lauderdale. The second section chronicles the now-divorced man returning to his old haunts, with a new love, to find that everything, and nothing, is the same.
Trip to Tipton and Other Compulsions, a volume of sixty-eight poems, records the unfolding events from one year of the author's life, capturing special highlights (a trip to Europe with his wife, the celebration of their second wedding anniversary, their mystical visits to Wisconsin and Illinois) as well as daily routines (his first experiences as an outlet-store manager and as a traveling salesman, his journeys to St. Louis and to small Midwestern towns, his home life in Farmington, Missouri), revealing his struggle to incorporate the idealistic, romantic world of the artist into his realistic, pragmatic existence as a young, newly married businessman, left wondering if life is more than "the sum of seasons leaving and arrived.
This volume's forty-seven poems trace Brodsky's life as a road-poet and manager of outlet stores, during a time when he was "itinerant minister of surplus and flaw," traveling throughout the Midwest, "selling his soul wholesale," by day, and assuaging his loneliness, at night, with wine and music, while hiding himself away in hotel bars that might absorb him in their "dim-lit anonymity.
As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Once upon a Small-Town Time have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in an uplifting nostalgia, but without the cloying sentimentality. The observations are fond, even wistful, but never anything but fair and clear and unexaggerated in their effect.
In the fourth volume of the fivebook series The Seasons of Youth, Louis Daniel Brodsky traces the growth of his daughter, from ages six to eleven, and that of his son, from three to eight. His girl develops socially, attending her first sleepover and making friends with her classmates. She also matures emotionally, as evidenced during the mornings she shares with her father, who practices spelling with her, at home, and drives her to school, the two of them often sharing breakfast in one of their small town's cafes. His boy goes through phases of fascination -- trains, airplanes, dinosaurs and whales -- but finds his mother's avocations of drawing and painting to be his steady preoccupations, allowing him to give order to his ever-expanding world. And both kids begin coming to terms with their father's increasingly frequent business trips. Hopgrassers and Flutterbies is a touching universal portrait of a devoted, loving father and mother and their two flourishing children.
During thirty years of literary collecting, Louis Daniel Brodsky has acquired some of the most important source materials on the life and work of William Faulkner anywhere available. Indeed, the Brodsky Collection, now owned by Southeast Missouri State University, has been characterized by Robert Penn Warren as "stupendous." In William Faulkner, Life Glimpses, Brodsky mines this storehouse of previously unpublished material, using interviews, letters, speeches, movie scripts, and notes to enrich our understanding of this well-known Southern writer. The result is a highly readable biography that is thematic and episodic rather than chronological in its organization. Building on specific documents in the collection, Brodsky opens new windows on the parallel development of Faulkner's literary career and personal life. New material on the early poems ''Elder Watson in Heaven" and "Pregnancy" gives insight into Faulkner's developing literary and personal aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s. Faulkner's metamorphosis from self-doubting, isolated artist to confident public spokesman during the 1940s and 1950s forms the central core of the study. Through previously unavailable screenplays written for Warner Bros. during World War II and an interview with Faulkner's fellow screenwriter Albert I. "Buzz" Bezzerides, Brodsky charts the decline in Faulkner's literary output and his corresponding discovery of a public voice. He shows how Faulkner's astonishingly positive 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech was not a sudden about-face from the bleak outlook that had produced The Sound and the Fury. Rather, Faulkner's years in Hollywood showed him that words, even screenplays, could shape the way people think and react. Faulkner's lifelong quest for a "manly" role ended, Brodsky declares, when he took up the mantle of public spokesmanship. In the final chapter, a revealing interview with Faulkner's granddaughter, Victoria Fielden Johnson, paints an insider's portrait of life at the Faulkner home, Rowan Oak. A copy of Faulkner's recipe for curing pork, included in the appendix, emphasizes his longterm struggle to produce fine literature while supplying the everyday needs of a large family. These and other materials, previously unavailable to scholars and the reading public, will broaden and enrich our understanding of one of America's most celebrated writers.
In the concluding volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky's narrative trilogy about a Northerner's personal odyssey in Faulkner's Mississippi, the hypocrisy and bigotry of small-town Oxford, with its commercialization of Faulkner, exacerbate the main character's disillusion, a malaise that ultimately leads to his moral and spiritual degradation. Louis D. Brodsky always works in improbable and daring ways. The narrator of this striking monologue . . . metaphorically transforms the State of Mississippi into "Mistress Mississippi," the image incarnate of his illusions and delusions of desire.
In this book, Louis Daniel Brodsky proves to be not only a skilled poet but also a very sensitive contemporary Jew. Vividly portraying the inner turmoil and chutzpadik bravery of Abraham, he then traces the "Diaspora mentality" of Jews throughout our history. Periods of progress and persecution inform the contemporary Jewish psyche. In the tradition of Biblical prophets, he portrays the alienated and disaffected Jew with disgust yet also with hope that the ties can be rebound. These writings will cause anyone interested in four thousand years of Jewish history to look deeper into its meaning in today's assimilated Jewish world.
Fiction. Short Stories. Meet the ordinary people who inhabit Louis Daniel Brodsky's neighborhood. There's the young man who becomes a tree, and the one who, thanks to magical seeds, becomes who he is. There's the open-heart-surgery patient whose chest cavity becomes the trash receptacle for the operating team. And just what do all these characters have in common? They have one foot in the funny farm, and they're candidates for the butterfly net. In other words, like Brodsky himself, they're folks "with one foot in the butterfly farm.
In the second volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky's narrative trilogy about a Northerner's personal odyssey in Faulkner's Mississippi, the main character leaves his Missouri home more and more frequently, for this cultural "oasis" and recognizes that marital discord is at the heart of his flights. Moreover, his original perceptions of the land and its people, based largely on his reading of Faulkner's novels, start to delude him. Brodsky's verse is steeped in the sensuous brew of the North Mississippi country, and the mixture of ingredients -- what he finds there, what it tells him about himself -- makes for memorable poems.
The Eleventh Lost Tribe, Brodsky's fourth book of poems devoted to the Holocaust, asks the reader to confront the dispossessed lives of ghetto dwellers, death-camp survivors, Jews prescient or desperate enough to have fled Europe prior to being captured and slaughtered, and, finally, children of the Shoah's refugees or orphans of those who perished in it. Exposing the gritty existence of characters Brodsky has resurrected from his imagination, the book's four sections implore the reader to follow on a quest not so much for historical fact as emotional truth, in search of a better understanding of our incredulity and outrage over the Holocaust.
In You Can't Go Back, Exactly, Louis Daniel Brodsky shows us, with delight and poignancy, how "a few of Earth's miracles work." While we never may be able to go back, exactly, we have the good fortune, through Mr. Brodsky's great skill in measuring the distances between past and present "with metaphor and rhyme-chime," to have, for a moment, a fleeting glimpse of a lake cabin's screen door kept "from closing, forever," while the deepest wisdom of the heart is ". . . forever in the dripping sunset's net." The father knows that the ritual he initiates in bringing his son to camp "Contains the same words and phrases / The Lord spoke to Abraham about Isaac," while the poet celebrates a return to "this sacred place" where the beauty of the ephemeral and the wonder of the eternal become one.
Poetry. What mom doesn't recall the magical seasons surrounding the birth of her baby--the anticipation felt during pregnancy; the pain and pride, on delivering; the joy of watching her child grow? And what dad can forget saying to himself, upon first holding his infant, "I'm really a father now," with all the accompanying awareness of being responsible for another human being? Chronicling the development of his own firstborn, from her conception through age one, Louis Daniel Brodsky provides, for us all--from experienced parents to those who have yet to see that "gleam in the eye"--a window on that glorious time.
While history may withhold its judgment of President George W. Bush, for several more years, Brodsky, in Showdown with a Cactus, sees no reason to wait. In 101 poems, he relentlessly questions the motives behind the foreign and domestic policies of our forty-third president, with special attention paid to the disastrous military excursion into Iraq. Bush's cabinet and advisors, also, are treated to Brodsky's sometimes scathing examination, as is the complacency of many American citizens, who, in the poem "Re: Election," are only too happy to ignore the state of the world: "Sing Hallelujah! George the Lord has risen!
Poetry. Louis Daniel Brodsky's At Shore's Border: Poems of Lake Nebagamon offers a range of pleasures. Recalling Whitman in his effortless prose-like rhythms, Thoreau in his immersion in a single natural setting, and Emerson in his rapturous encounter with nature's mobile cast of creatures and settings, Brodsky joins company with earlier American romantics, yet speaks in his own inimitable voice. The self's encounter with nature is at once an inexhaustible American story and Brodsky's compellinig personal theme.
The third volume of THE SEASONS OF YOUTH celebrates the author's growing family, with the birth of a son. Father and mother revisit the daily joys and challenges of seeing a child flourish from infancy into the preschool years, while they marvel at their daughter's rapid physical and social development, as she progresses from age three to six and a half, exhibiting the first hints of who she'll be as an adult. In thirty-nine poems that poignantly dramatize the interweaving of four lives, Louis Daniel Brodsky shares myriad rituals of childrearing (bathing, meal time, school days, pets, playing, first words, getting ready for bed), all of which offer chances to experience the coming-of-age wonders of early maturation and the rites of initiation into love's simple complexities--opportunities to seize the sun and moon.
Describing himself as midway through his "poet's journey," Brodsky reaches deep into his heritage, in this volume of forty-seven chronologically arranged poems, aligning himself "with tillers of the tribe of Abraham" as he makes his way, alone, "toward the frontiers of verse," still knowing that "the Holy Land is just out of sight.
In this fifty-eight-poem collection, Brodsky examines the highs and lows authors experience as they practice their craft. Portraying everything from writer's block and the terror of the blank page to the overwhelming joy of finishing a work, The World Waiting To Be is both lamentation and love song to creative inspiration and the intersection of time and eternity, in the act of writing.
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