Ode to My Autumn
Victor Altshul’s Ode to My Autumn rings all the changes: from nostalgia to satire, from melancholy to joy, from the personal to the ekphrastic, from the traditional to the whimsical. It is as various and as fascinating as life itself.
About the book, Clare Rossini has written, “Like all the best poetry, Victor Altshul’s Ode to My Autumn is written out of the poet’s sense of mortal urgency. Whether taking on the perspective of a ruminative blue heron, exploring the tragedy of a brother’s mental illness, or coming to terms with one of the many writers, artists, and musicians who serve as co-conspirators in his art-making, Altshul tracks his thought and emotion with an intensity and clarity that draw us in. The success of these poems is due in no small measure to Altshul’s adept control of his craft. This is a poet equally at home in free and formal verse (his villanelle is superb!), and the music of the poems is consistently convincing. Altshul’s voice has similar range, moving from tender to incisive political commentary to rueful self-awareness; every key is played here. And, yes, Altshul is also capable of being scintillatingly funny in his poems, a rare feat. But finally, it’s the felt sense of the life behind the work—one deeply considered and passionately owned—that makes it hard to put down Victor Altshul’s Ode to My Autumn.” To Order this book and read samples from it go to: http://antrimhousebooks.com/altshul.html |
Singing with Starlings
Victor's New Book: Singing with Starlings
Joyful and anguished, witty and lyrical, passionate and philosophical, Victor Altshul’s Singing with Starlings is a romp, a descent into the Abyss, a flight into song, an outcry against the willful ways of the world, and a lover’s shout-out. Always, these poems have the utter honesty of one who knows by heart the depths and dancings of the human spirit. Barry Zaret writes, “These poems are constructed with a poet’s heart and a psychiatrist’s mind, hammered on the anvil of joy, exultation, trauma and grief. They draw on lifelong personal experience and love of art, literature, poetry and music. Once begun, Singing with Starlings is hard to discontinue until the end is reached, so intense and pleasurable is the immersion.” And this from Charles Douthat: “Anyone who’s spent much time on a therapist’s couch has wondered what the mostly silent therapist is really thinking. In his second book of poems, Victor Altshul, a practicing psychiatrist for nearly fifty years, breaks the silence and allows us access to his own heart. Singing with Starlings is a book of strong, witty, tender poems. Altshul writes movingly of his own childhood, of family life, of time’s passing, of love and love lost. There is a deep, wisdom-building pleasure in these poems and in what they reveal of one life’s sunlight and ‘what it bathed—the loneliness, the longing, fright and pain'." To Order this book and read samples from it go to: http://antrimhousebooks.com/altshul.html ISBN 978-1-936482-83-2 6" x 9" paperback, 64 pages $15.00 US per book plus 6.35% sales tax (CT only) Shipping & Handling: $4.00 for 1 book, $7 for 2 books, $9 for 3-4 books, and $12 for 5 or more books |
More Reviews
Ode to My Autumn Review Victor Altshul Antrim House Books (Mar 7, 2017) Softcover $16.96 (68pp) 978-1-943826-21-6
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
Ode to My Autumn contains dexterous, challenging, clever poems that are simply a joy to read.
Victor Altshul’s Ode to My Autumn is a collection of traditional poems with a great contemporary American poetic twist.
The most representative poems in the collection, which include “Years Before His Breakdown” and “The Way of the Clam,” typify a sense of loss and regret as the aging speaker recalls his youth. In “Years,” for example, he concludes that his younger brother’s mental and emotional breakdown “might have been averted if they’d / brought him with us on my ninth birthday.”
Straightforward lyrical poems such as “Portrait of a Lady,” “Valedictory,” and “Charlie” also examine the speaker’s family relationships, and they do so with elegance and indirectness that challenge and entice. The simple language of “Charlie,” a poem about the speaker’s relationship with the great-uncle who swindled his grandfather, begins with a hard tetrameter: “I said it only once to her; / I won’t risk saying it again.” Use of strict form and meter throughout the collection elevates the language and places it in the foreground.
With a title that alludes to John Keats, the collection makes use of classical poetic modes throughout. This is evident in the villanelle “Caddy.” Its two repeating lines—“I don’t know why you said she was a whore” and “You may have loved her but I loved her more”—illustrate not only the form’s required use of iambic pentameter, but also its requisite aba rhyme scheme, while the title is a complicated homage to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Both form and content evince great rhetorical skill.
The poem “Insolence” also exemplifies the speaker’s regret about his lack of a sex life, his failed relationships, and his fear of impending death: “Not to whine, but this shriveled / and facsimile of manliness / does little but caterpillar expansion.” These poems examine universal experiences and complaints about the human condition.
Literary and cultural references abound in the second section of the collection, “Music and Words,” and the obvious intertextuality further complicates the poetic tradition in which Altshul compellingly engages. The poem “Dear Emily” is one of the most skillful; it resurrects Emily Dickinson, playing with the dash that she often used: “[T]hose dashes, Emily—those infernal dashes— / stopping, starting, stopping, starting again—”.
Ode to My Autumn contains dexterous, challenging, clever poems that are simply a joy to read. While they employ traditional poetic form and subject matter, they stand as model poems in the genre of contemporary American poetry.
Reviewed by Philip J. Kowalski Reprinted fro Foreword Reviews https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/ode-to-my-autumn/