vert
Contributors
Description
In Vert, Hellberg's dexterity in the sonnet form is on full display. These poems range through the comic, the absurd, the weird, the tragic, the sacred, the profane. As if in response to Dickinson's query, 'Unto the Whole — how add?', Hellberg says, 'Hold — my beer'. These poems drag the sonnet, kicking and singing, into new territories and new valances.
Back cover blurb
In Vert, human virtues struggle amongst the syllables, finding, in the welter of harsh words and tender words, something bold as love. It's been a long time since anyone has taken the stuff of English as seriously as does Dustin Hellberg. This is a book of challenges and of new substances.
~ Donald Revell, author of White Campion, Drought-Adapted Vine and Sudden Eden
Though I could imagine a line by Frost that reads “The world is loud,” his cure would not be to “Stick your tongue in my ear.” Yet for Hellberg, in this interwoven collection of sonnets, the remedy of tongue in ear might be sound. Blurb reader, dear “spectrum of meat,” ready your ear to this form, invented, as Pound put it, “when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone.” With this book, we are twisted in Hellberg’s “tumbleweed that the car just missed.” Be alert to all that is new in these electrifying encounters.'
~ Jim Goar, author of Seoul Bus Poems, The Louisiana Purchase, and The Dustbowl
With Vert, Hellberg creates a tapestry of wonders both modern and belletristic. There is a clever playfulness in his verse that is clearly rooted in an extensive knowledge of canonic texts — this historical ballast grounds the poems as Hellberg’s lyric leaps into absurdity and marvel. Remaining playful with and loyal to the great mysteries of language throughout the collection, these poems dances with words and their etymologies, in places that feel almost like song: “Tulle from old French for ‘plated armor’. / Or saunter, santus terrus, ‘to holy land’. / Or muslin, mawshil, which is to join together. / Or seersucker, from the Persian, shir / u shakar, ‘milk and sugar, milk and sugar’.” It results in a book that is a joy to read.
~ Lauren Haldeman, author of Calenday, Instead of Dying, and Team Photograph