Wild Civility

David Biespiels long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "e;American sonnets"e; promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "e;Ive come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds,"e; says Biespiel, "e;something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."e;The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiels increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.