Of Thee I Sing
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In his fifth book of poems, Timothy Liu addresses a tripartite “Thee”: the Divine, the Beloved, and the State. A precarious dance between the spiritual and the material ensues, the lyric poem confronting a consumer culture overrun by rampant lust and greed yet finding itself unable to wholly stand outside of what it critiques. Any consolation found herein is short-lived. Even so, by extending the traditions of lyric poetry forward, these utterances seek to enlarge the conversation between art and life, anticipating whatever commerce the future might yet hold.Publishers WeeklyLiu's attractive fifth book departs from his previous work in its denser style, but not in its themes: intense devotion to gay male desire collides with painful self-scrutiny, political protest and snapshots of far-flung America, from New Jersey (where the poet teaches and lives) to the "red states" and their evangelical demands. Liu tackles these subjects in tough, sometimes fragmentary, free verse, starting with a terse, thoughtful "Ars Poetica": "All the world day-trading suicide shares.... The craft could be taught but not the art." A three-time Lambda Award nominee, Liu (Say Goodnight) still aims to shock ("Let me be your rotisserie Christ"), but those shocks are here aggregated toward a greater cause, as his poetry presses for understandings based on the body ("Flesh knows no future/ but itself, each of us mining a secret dream") and celebrates gay America from backseat to shining sea. One series links the end of a relationship to the expulsion from Eden, "Cruel speech soiling the nuptial bed"; other poems meld a post-Miltonic high style to down-and-dirty reportage, mixing choppy and verbally challenging poems with more fluid, narrative affairs. In Liu's hyperreal nation of passion and distress, "Innocence// means nothing to us now"; decadents and hayseeds join hands and cry out, while "sons who had once studied law// at their father's behest" are "sworn into a cult of moonlit chinoiserie." (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
AcknowledgmentsArs Poetica3Duck Hunting4Giacometti5Triptych in Black Lipstick6Last Day9Nor'easter Forty Miles Offshore10Full Fathom Five11Watching the Battleship Potemkin12Monologue with the Void13Having Transcended the Cares of This World14The Expulsion15Sine Qua Non16Archaic Torso17Waking Up18A Song of Experience19Little Elegy in G Minor20To Autumn21Anthem for Doomed Youth22Felix Culpa25With Cherubim and a Flaming Sword26A Blessing27The Marriage28The Assignation29The Gates of Hell30Sturm und Drang31Hic et Nunc32Just You Wait33Il Trittico34Tenderness in a Dark Age37Anniversary38F-Stop39Getting There40Bisexuality41Noli Me Tangere42The Marriage43Golden Fleece44Of Thee I Sing47All Hallows48Distant Laughter49From Sea to Shining Sea50At County General53Songs We Know but Cannot Sing54No Worse Off Than a Houseboy Unemployed55Target56Bleecker Street57In Hot Pursuit58A Crown59La Divina60Visiting My Mother's Grave61Romance62Woman with Dog, 191763Wake Me Up When the Real Opera Begins64Like an Emperor Gored by a Papal Bull65
