Steady Daylight - by Joseph Bathanti (Paperback)

About the Book

"Joseph Bathanti's latest volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, returns again to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. These poems sift the precarious and wholly unreliable terrain of memory, working paradoxically through the lens of the documentarian and the fabulist at once, where the portal into the past, and thus the congress among the living and the dead, opens capriciously at its own whim. The speaker in Steady Daylight traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the "old" East Liberty have evanesced--faded letters and the "faithfully departed," daguerreotypes and tattered versions of stories passed down in broken English, bulldozed buildings and a pig-headed refusal to divulge--Bathanti invents a world ample enough for the dead and the living with verse by turns old world and operatic. Through incantatory language thrumming with hope and photographic integrity, laced with light and benediction, he reimagines what once was in renderings shot through with more psychic truth and revelation than anything that might have really happened. Ultimately, Steady Daylight is an elegy and a praise song, a heartbreakingly beautiful requiem"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Steady Daylight, the latest volume of poetry from Joseph Bathanti, returns to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The speaker traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the "old" East Liberty have evanesced, Bathanti invents a world ample enough for the dead and the living through incantatory language thrumming with hope and photographic integrity. Ultimately, Steady Daylight is an elegy and a praise song, a heartbreakingly beautiful requiem.

Review Quotes

"Bathanti's wonderful new book of poems is filled with stunning recall, as if from an obsessed insomniac bearing a camera, revealing an old Pittsburgh, filled with 'straphangers, cigarettes and slush / the bus finally [wheezing] to the curb, ' ever conscious of class and racial divides and annihilations that have existed from the start."--Judith Vollmer

"Plainspoken, set on streets with names like Liberty and Prince, the poems in Joseph Bathanti's Steady Daylight travel through time, taking us back to a midcentury Italian American childhood in Pittsburgh, a vanished world. Every memory feels alive here. Bathanti has a gift for making the past present, his poems like brief requiems for the living and the dead."--Jehanne Dubrow

"What you hold in your hands isn't simply a collection of poems; what you hold is the song of a lifetime, a timeline drafted in verse, generations arriving, generations given to the earth, decades of history housed by Bathanti's loving pen. He gives us the full arc of a life in these pages, and we are transported, augmented, filled with the spirit of it all."--Brian Turner

About the Author

Joseph Bathanti, author of more than twenty books, is the former North Carolina poet laureate (2012-14); recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state's highest civilian honor; and an inductee of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.