Splendor

Signed copies available in limited supply

Steve Kronen's poems explore the hardships that daily challenge the human heart. From such hardships, compassion and empathy arise. Some of the poems in Splendor focus on our inescapable vulnerability due to aging or accident.  Splendor also includes a number of love poems to the author's wife and daughter. And because he feels that the first person is often claustrophobic and enervating, much of the book looks beyond self and family. Many of the poems are rhymed and metered and play with formal elements. Throughout are sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, a Dantean canzone, nonce forms, and others. From the New York Times Book Review (December 10, 2006): "You'd have to look to Paul Muldoon to find a more outrageous end-rhymer than Kronen. Or a quieter one. Kronen works extensively in fixed (and some feral) forms, but his lines, like Muldoon's, tend to be so metrically irregular and heavily enjambed that even the full rhymes barely register. It's a deliberately subdued music, more for the mind than for the ear....Kronen's skill with the figurative allows him to borrow figures from familiar sources (the Old Testament, classical mythology), apply them to familiar subjects, and still produce something original."

The Last Evening

          after Rilke

And night and the large wheels turning,
rutting the earth toward the cannon’s thunder.
He looked up from the piano to find her
across the room, her face a warning
and a prayer, mirroring, he realized, his own.
Outside, a fresh wind ruffled the trees above
the house and she grew more seductive
in his gaze as he continued with the song.

Then suddenly, both faces dulled.
And he stopped playing while she listened
to the wind and to her heart. His field cap
on the table now seemed strangely distant,
folded neatly as though it were an ancient map
holding within itself all the monstrous world.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2006

Available editions:
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-929918-78-2
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: May 2006