Hurry Back

Here are Alvin Greenberg's poems of experience, his grown man's tribute to negative capability. He knows we live in a world of indeterminacy, with our various ignorances and failures of language. Yet without prettying-up these conditions, his "Hurry Back" offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed paean to them, a kind of elegiac lean-to/set right out in the weather because the weather's/what there is and where we do our loving." Though such sagacity pervades this book, these are not poems of resignation. Greenberg knows the birds on the highway "almost always" fly up in time, but he's not going to let that "almost" stop him from driving a little over the speed limit." --Stephen DunnAbout the Author(s)Alvin Greenberg is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and librettist. His new novel, "Time Lapse," was published in 2003 by Tupelo Press, and The University of Utah Press published his collection of personal essays, "The Dog of Memory: A Family Album of Secrets and Silences," in 2002. His most recent collection of short stories, "How the Dead Live," appeared in 1998 from Graywolf Press; previous collections include "The Man in the Cardboard Mask" (Coffee House Press), "Delta q"(University of Missouri Press), and "The Discovery of America" (Louisiana State University Press). His collections of poetry include "Why We Live with Animals "(Coffee House Press) "Heavy Wings" (Ohio Review Press), and "In/Direction" (David R. Godine). He has also collaborated on three operas with composer Eric Stokes, most recently "Apollonia's Circus" (premiered at the University of Minnesota, 1994). After teaching for thirty four years in the Macalester College English Department in St. Paul, Minnesota, he now lives in Boise, Idaho, where his wife, poet Janet Holmes, teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University.