Flame in a Stable - by Martin Edmunds (Paperback)

About the Book

In his first collection in over 25 years, poet Martin Edmunds' Flame in a Stable is an alarmingly poignant and intelligent book of poems. From the author of the National Poetry Series winning The High Road to Taos.

Book Synopsis

In his first collection in over 25 years, poet Martin Edmunds' Flame in a Stable is an alarmingly poignant and intelligent book of poems. Author of the National Poetry Series winning The High Road to Taos, Edmunds draws you in with each word like the chains of an anchor being lifted onto a boat. Mixing the sacred and the sinful in a knowing and playful way, come read and hear from yourself what poet Tom Sleigh calls the "textured and rebellious music of Martin Edmunds's Flame in a Stable."

Review Quotes

"Flame in a Stable admits me into the committed life of a literate, far-reaching, colloquial, passionate, playful, and witty poetic voice - what more can we ask?"

-Jim Kates, The Arts Fuse

"Martin Edmunds as always loads every rift with ore. With its compelling cadence, with its command of dense diction, Edmunds's language is a sensuous and sensible joy."

- Donald Hall

"Martin Edmunds's poems resonate with Hopkins, Robert Lowell, Montale, and Cole Porter, but the mixture of eloquence, sass, and directness is his own: 'My life is loose-leaf/ and purple strife.' In work culled from many years, he mourns, curses, and chants love-spells and god-spells. An enchantment."

- Rosanna Warren

"When Osip Mandelstam wrote how the 'infinite raw material of poetic sound' is 'ever distrustful and offensive to culture because of its suspicious nature, and which spits culture out like water used for gargling, ' he exactly describes the densely textured and rebellious music of Martin Edmunds's Flame in a Stable. I can't think of another living contemporary poet who takes such consolatory pleasure in the sound of words even as he turns that music against the mythology of empire, the pax Americana, and his own anguished relationship to "the peace that passeth understanding." And yet underneath the privately ironic self-reckonings and the public excoriations, there is a raw, erotic joyousness coursing all through this book that makes it as restorative as it is rebarbative."

- Tom Sleigh