Michael C Blumenthal's Books
Oct.16.2012
No Hurry, the author’s eighth book of poems, is a book of poems written in mid-age, which focuses on the amalgamation, and synthesis, of life experiences that might, or so we would like to hope, lead to wisdom The title is meant as an imploration, both to the writer and to his readers: No hurry to read these poems...
May.01.2009
Through Michael Blumenthal’s eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships, to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Michael Blumenthal uses the conjunction – AND – to unify this new collection and create a incantatory, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises.
Feb.18.2008
From Publishers WeeklyTo poet Martin Weinstock, disgruntled lecturer at Harvard, the Ivy League school is a deadly place, rife with faculty suicides yet smug with an insular narrowness of vision. Blumenthal's graceful, wise, moving first novel begins as a savage, hilarious satire of academia and the literary world, then plunges into Weinstock's painstaking self-analysis, a process...
Feb.01.2002
Blumenthal, a poet and director of Harvard's creative writing program, has written the touching story of his search for his true identity. After he was born, his biological parents left him to be raised by his aunt and uncle; it was not until later that he discovered that his "parents" were in reality not his birth mother and father. After the woman who raised him died of...
Oct.15.1999
From Library Journal There aren't many poets these days who can get away with using words like beautiful and wonderful and good--but in Blumenthal's work, these words seem fresh and underutilized. Blumenthal (The Wages of Goodness) writes in a style that is pure, simple, utterly accessible, loving, lyrical, and full of emotion. He writes of a Scrabble game: "as you wind up...
Feb.01.1998
"A vivid, poignant, unforgettable panorama of Central Europe in the mid-1990's. Michael Blumenthal, a leading American poet and novelist, has written a brilliant series of sketches, lyrical, incisive, empathetic, funny, and wise--at once deeply personal and full of insight--about a fascinating world in transition from a haunted and haunting past to the modern Hustle." --...
A book-length meditation in poetry in 32 sections written in the voice of a swimmer in mid-life during a half-mile swim in which he meditates on physical, intellectual and spiritual life and attempts to deal with childhood grief over the death of his mother when he was ten. Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry in l984.
From Library Journal This poet's fifth book is as notable for its moral gravitas as for its lyrical grace. Blumenthal meditates on fatherhood, personal history, love, loss, and gain as intertwined threads of life's mingled yarn. "Elegy for My Mother: The Days," the centerpiece of the book, is a major poem that, while speaking from personal experience, moves us by...
Michael Blumenthal's Days We Would Rather Know, originally published by Viking-Penguin and sold out in both its original printings, was one of the most admired, and most influential, books of American poetry of the l980s, and marked the auspicious continuation of one of the decade's most promising debuts. Of Michael Blumenthal's first book, Sympathetic Magic, Howard Nemerov said,...
From Library Journal Blumenthal's new collection moves surely through the contradictions implied by its title. Belonging to the "central" modernist tradition of Wallace Stevens and informed by both wit and intelligence, the poems take us through a variety of topics and moods without losing sight of the book's pivotal experience, a divorce. Urbane, sophisticated, sometimes...
"Blumenthal the latter-day psalmist encompasses in these brilliant poems both chatter and stillness, pantheism and skepticism, rapture and resignation to the ordinary. He is a wisdom poet, in the fullness of vision and opulent language."”
—Phillip Lopate
About Michael
Michael Blumenthal graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, will be published by BOA Editions in May, 2009. A graduate...
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