Michael Heller, Eschaton
ISBN: 978-1-58498-065-0, paper, $13.95
“Like the Renaissance and Neo-classical poets who speculated on the Great Chain of Being and microcosm-macrocosm relationships, Heller communicates a vision of human life as related to natural processes of great intricacy and magnitude. He
strains his mind and the reader’s to find the relationships between our experience and these processes in the material world, but the sense of magnificence is worth the strain.”--Parnassus: Poetry in Review
“He’s a somewhat latter-day Jewish Yeats, full of terror and joy, trying to make some sense of the chaotic destructiveness of the 20th century in lyric poetry. It is a heroic if impossible task.”--The East Hampton Star
“a singular address to unknowingness”--Confrontation
“Mr. Heller’s book is intent on inquiry, full of rumination...filled with illumination. His is a questing intelligence, forever on the trail of the epistemological, the 'flimsy beatitudes of order’”--The New York Times Book Review
“There is in these poems a strange Promethean struggle between blind force and will. Heller is a pioneer.”--Ironwood
Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. His most recent collection of poetry is Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003). He is the author of two autobiographical works, Earth and Cave (2007) and Living Root: A Memoir (2001), and his critical books include Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008), Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (2006), and his prize-winning book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction's Net of Branches (1985).
His collection of short fiction, Two Novellas, was published in 2008. His opera libretto Constellations of Waking, set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson, was performed at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphiain 2001. He has won many prizes for his poetry including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the NEH Poet/ Scholar fellowship and an award from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.
“Like the Renaissance and Neo-classical poets who speculated on the Great Chain of Being and microcosm-macrocosm relationships, Heller communicates a vision of human life as related to natural processes of great intricacy and magnitude. He
strains his mind and the reader’s to find the relationships between our experience and these processes in the material world, but the sense of magnificence is worth the strain.”--Parnassus: Poetry in Review
“He’s a somewhat latter-day Jewish Yeats, full of terror and joy, trying to make some sense of the chaotic destructiveness of the 20th century in lyric poetry. It is a heroic if impossible task.”--The East Hampton Star
“a singular address to unknowingness”--Confrontation
“Mr. Heller’s book is intent on inquiry, full of rumination...filled with illumination. His is a questing intelligence, forever on the trail of the epistemological, the 'flimsy beatitudes of order’”--The New York Times Book Review
“There is in these poems a strange Promethean struggle between blind force and will. Heller is a pioneer.”--Ironwood
Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. His most recent collection of poetry is Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003). He is the author of two autobiographical works, Earth and Cave (2007) and Living Root: A Memoir (2001), and his critical books include Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008), Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (2006), and his prize-winning book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction's Net of Branches (1985).
His collection of short fiction, Two Novellas, was published in 2008. His opera libretto Constellations of Waking, set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson, was performed at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphiain 2001. He has won many prizes for his poetry including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the NEH Poet/ Scholar fellowship and an award from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.