Composing Voices - by Robert Pack (Paperback)

About the Book

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husband and wife; doctor and patient; lawyer and client. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts.

Book Synopsis

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husband and wife; doctor and patient; lawyer and client. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts.

About the Author

Among Robert Pack's eighteen books of poetry, his most recent collections are: Elk in Winter (2004), Rounding It Out (1999), Minding the Sun (1996), and Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems (1993), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Pack's poetry focuses on such major themes as man's relationship to nature, and human intimacy-friendships and family relationships. His most recent book of criticism, Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost, was published in 1993 by the New England University Press, a study of Frost in the tradition of nature poetry. Pack's earlier collections of essays, The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft and Affirming Limits were published by the University of Massachusetts Press.