Best Man - Lewis, Owen

. .

Résumé :
Poetry. In this powerful sequence of poems, Owen Lewis bravely revisits the death of his younger brother in 1980, trying to make what sense he can of inexplicable loss. He summons his brother by 'taking every memory that [comes] to me like a hand in the dark,' by listening attentively to what his brother's spirit might be saying from beyond the grave, and by speaking back to him and offering him a troubled but loving place in the poet's current life. Like the dune fences that make up one of the sequence's motifs, these poems are stays against confusion that, paradoxically, do not attempt to fully wall out that confusion but, instead, let it in: 'Enough slats / to keep things together, but still / some sand pours through.' The result is a poetry that is deeper and more moving, open both to pain and vision.--Jeffrey Harrison...

Biographie:
Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine....

Sommaire:
Although it took over thirty years to come to write Best Man, it is a story I needed to tell. Despite this long gestation, it was not until I was well into the writing of it that I first considered-why now, why now was I writing about a brother gone for three decades? An answer to the question came and worked itself into the poem Introducing. How was I to explain this part of my life to someone new in my life, to my then future wife Susan Ennis. I thank her for this impetus, and for the love that sustains my writing. Best Man comprises twenty-three poems. Jason lived to be twenty-three. For my parents, now deceased, who did their utmost to sustain him, and to my brother Arthur who shared Jason's life and has his own story to tell-this book is offered. -Owen Lewis ...