Overview

Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough’s style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems’ sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration.

Full Product Details

9781609389833

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Profoundly intelligent and erudite, steeped in the metaphysicals, Aaron McCollough's poems alternately tantalize with their hermeticism and dazzle with their sudden outpourings of radiant clarity. The mirrors so important to this collection are like the surfaces of lakes: protean, dreamy, distorting, swallowing up and transforming everything in their purview, as McCollough's voracious intellect swallows up language and delivers it back to us refracted, estranged--as the past itself is transfigured by our memory of it. I found myself reveling in this writing, transfixed among the 'dusty stars.'""--Donna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia ""Searching for a form that observes history and song but falls short of orthodoxy, Salms is a genuine revelation of McCollough's unique gift to sound out the furious trials of being, with a lens brought right into his soul's mind's eye. In line after line, McCollough shocks his instrument into truths that last only until they are uprooted by the next; doubt and faith and love and loss exchange places in a dizzying exchange that is both brilliant and devastating. Salms is kin and heir to the likes of Donne and Herbert and to Geoffrey Hill.""--Martin Corless-Smith, author, The Poet's Tomb"

“Profoundly intelligent and erudite, steeped in the metaphysicals, Aaron McCollough’s poems alternately tantalize with their hermeticism and dazzle with their sudden outpourings of radiant clarity. The mirrors so important to this collection are like the surfaces of lakes: protean, dreamy, distorting, swallowing up and transforming everything in their purview, as McCollough’s voracious intellect swallows up language and delivers it back to us refracted, estranged—as the past itself is transfigured by our memory of it. I found myself reveling in this writing, transfixed among the ‘dusty stars.’”—Donna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia “Searching for a form that observes history and song but falls short of orthodoxy, Salms is a genuine revelation of McCollough’s unique gift to sound out the furious trials of being, with a lens brought right into his soul’s mind’s eye. In line after line, McCollough shocks his instrument into truths that last only until they are uprooted by the next; doubt and faith and love and loss exchange places in a dizzying exchange that is both brilliant and devastating. Salms is kin and heir to the likes of Donne and Herbert and to Geoffrey Hill.”—Martin Corless-Smith, author, The Poet’s Tomb

Author Information

Aaron McCollough is copublisher of SplitLevel Texts, and is author of Rank (Iowa, 2015). He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available