The Notebook of False Purgatories by Standard Schaefer

Description

Poetry

2013

“Standard Schaefer’s work has consistently been little short of extraordinary. But now in this his fourth book, in the tradition of politically committed visionaries (almost as if he were a mix of Gerard de Nerval and Hannah Weiner), he calls us toward a ‘humbler arrangement’ of art and love, insisting in this set of triumphant and authentic aphorisms that nothing of or in this world is a fiasco, that if we mistake distraction for enchantment and fail to listen to the static of war, the lack of love, the codes of poetics and politics (which are one), we fail the real. Wonderment is an ethical discipline. Noons are all around us. I have never seen a poet do this to such an extraordinary degree. This is one of the few books that will remain, or so I would hope.”—Gabriel Gudding