The Face - by David St John (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A haunting and inventive book length sequence of poems from the distinguished author of Study for the World's Body.

The Face is both fiercely lyrical and intimately conversational. Coming to terms with the failure of a great love, the speaker descends into his own dark night of the soul. Here are poems that explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly, the speaker reassembles his life and again finds faith in himself and the world. These poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope; meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.

Deeply passionate and raw in its candour, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Lowell's Life Studies and Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were.

Review Quotes

"St. John has written an extremely beautiful book that brings us to the edge of beauty and beauty's possibility." -- Harvard Review

"A shattered, ironic, yet seductive and haunting sequence of poems ... [of] languorous beauty." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"St. John's expansive, barely lineated prose brims with color, motion, and a cinematographer's sense of mise-en-scène." -- Library Journal