Description
ORNITHOLOGY
by M. G. Stephens
$15.99, paper
979-8-88838-298-1
2023
M. G. Stephens considers our physical world and its health as portrayed by our own relationship to birds and their well-being. Here the birds are bellwethers of the Earth’s and our own human survival. But mostly these poems are about that most human of emotions—love—in all its permutations. This poet is not afraid to be lyrical and to love; in fact, he sees the lyrical impulse as poetry’s most natural expression, just as love is the most creative and expressive part of our very humanness. Nowhere is this writer more in love with the music of our natural world than when he is observing the birds which inhabit and share that space with us.
Michael Gregory Stephens is the author of 29 books, including such poetry and prose poem collections as Alcohol Poems, Paragraphs, Tangun Legend, Circles End, Translations (from Korean), Jigs and Reels, After Asia, Occam’s Razor, and Top Boy. More recently he published the hybrid work, History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion (MadHat Press, 2021), as well as a novel about Modernist poet Ezra Pound entitled King Ezra (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). In 2023, as well as Ornithology, Stephens will have a collection of stories, Jesus’ Dog, published. Next year his memoir When Poetry Was the World is due out. M. G. Stephens was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and further out on Long Island, the third of sixteen children. He published his first book, the novel Season at Coole with E. P. Dutton over fifty years ago, and continues to write and publish regularly. He graduated from City College of New York and Yale University, and later in life, living in England, he wrote a Ph.D., at the University of Essex, on the early years of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie. When Poetry Was the World, his memoir, is based on that doctoral research. Currently he lives north of Chicago in Evanston, Illinois.
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