Prism

Poetry. This book of new poems by David St. John includes fourteen vibrant photographs by Lance Patigian. One of the finest poetic craftsmen of his generation, David St. John has recevied regular and lavish praise from his contemporaries. Speaking of his poetry, Robert Hass has said, "It is not just gorgeous, it is go-for-broke gorgeous. It is made out of sentences, sweeping through and across his meticulous verse stanzas, that could have been written, for their velvet and intricate suavity, by Henry James. But that doesn't quite describe them, since they are also full, almost past ripeness, of a floating, sometimes painful, sometimes wistful, intense, dark and silvery eroticism that feels as if it comes out of some cross between late nineteeth-century symbolist lushness--vague and specific at once--and the kind of '60s and '70s European film that talked about eroticism with a wistfulness so intense that it seemed experience and the melancholy recollection of experience were the same th