The Bright Nails Scattered On The Ground

Allen Grossman

Grossman is without question one of the most powerful American poets of the middle generation… [his] poetry is a poetry of great pain and great passions mediated by, as Grossman sees it, the intelligence of art.

Antioch Review

The Bright Nails Scattered On The Ground

Poetry by Allen Grossman

Allen Grossman’s The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground is a book of poetry which tells of a man and a woman in love. Since their bond is unsanctioned, they must confront the task of building another universe in which their love can have a place. This is the creational work of their union, intimate, historical, and cosmic, that must be tested against reality and hope––in short, against the totality of human affairs. The book is divided into three parts at whose center are two full narratives (“A Blue Heron” and “Eurydice, or The Third Reich of Dreams”) in which the man and woman each produce the story of their own existence. The shorter poems of the first and third parts set forth the context of their love, from the primordial shattering of full providence (“The Song of the Lord”) to reconciliation in worlds of possible consummation (“Quies or Rest”). An elegaic pilgrimage, The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground looks back to Lucretius, Dante, and the Kabbalah, to Hölderlin, Yeats, and Rilke, in its quest for the actuality of love.

Buy The Bright Nails Scattered On The Ground

Paperback(published May, 01 1986)

ISBN
9780811209762
Price US
15.95
Portrait of Allen Grossman

Allen Grossman

Contemporary American poet

Grossman is without question one of the most powerful American poets of the middle generation… [his] poetry is a poetry of great pain and great passions mediated by, as Grossman sees it, the intelligence of art.

Antioch Review