Kirjahaku

"The harsh, complex clarity and paradoxically tender compassion of this book make an extraordinary power for the dimensions of its hero, Duhamel. No work of recent poetry has entered such ground at all. Bill Tremblay offers a unique testament to a world whose brutal fragility has found no other way to speak." - Robert Creeley, reviewing a previous edition or volume

These poems engage the life of the famed Mexican muralist Jose "David" Alfaro Siqueiros, whose vision of a free, generous, and artistically liberated Mexico, completely responsive to both its people and its history, unified and informed his inner and outer worlds.It is a book about the muralist's sensibility, about the way in which his experimental art and his human concerns synthesised in his work to become his vision.Less a biography than an interpretation of one artist's sensibility in love, war, and painting, it is an interdependent sequence that argues out its dialectic in a connected and accretive way. The result is a magical and riveting work of historiography and the lyric imagination.

These poems represent a turn in Bill Tremblay's long, distinguished career. The political and social concerns are still present, as well as the powerful lyric invention that has marked his previous collections.What's new is the poems' meditative interiority, the sense of a man alone with his faiths, failures, feelings, and thoughts as he walks daily along the irrigation ditch near his house, the Rocky Mountains and great Colorado sky in the background, dwarfing all that anyone ever thought, did, or believed.The whole book has about it a passionate, mesmerizing calm.

The Luminous Racetrack is a collection of frank and lyrical poems based on Bill Tremblay's childhood and youth in Southbridge, Massachusetts. It is a uniquely intimate coming-of-age story and a masterful witness to the details and beliefs of a bygone era. It is a graceful and magical narrative told with great skill and intelligence.