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Books
by
RICHARD
GILMORE LOFTUS
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EDITOR'S
PICK — BookLife / Publishers Weekly
“An intimate
yet timeless remark on time’s weathering of the body, the mind,
memory, spirituality and art. … A singular wonder.”
Loftus’s
fourth poetry collection, following 2021’s Autumn is an
intimate yet timeless remark on time’s weathering of the body,
the mind, memory, spirituality, and art. “Laurels grow moldy //
and rot just like me // faces grow old // on cinema screens,”
Loftus writes in “Flimflam Man.” Such is the grief of having
lived and still living, but Loftus uses this sorrow as a starting
point, as a foundation to explore what mysteries and surprises
erupt from the experience of aging, like beauty, even in death,
which Loftus describes in “The End of the World” as “a
flutter in her chest, like a butterfly having trouble lifting
from a flower.”
In Loftus’s poems, memories
transcend the intangible and enter the physical world; they
attain a state of being and change like people, like the seasons.
In “Naming the Animals” the poet compares memories to
“animals [calling] us in the dark,” and in “Enamel,” a
clawfoot tub “in the old house, a dozen miles and a decade
off,” houses in its void what is left of “his preening,
waning youth.” Loftus uses figments from his past as clay to
sculpt poems that relate grand insights about what it is to
experience the gift and curse of time, which come forth with
particular clarity in “Craquelure.”
The poem
begins with the speaker flipping through a book of Renior
paintings with “such brittle, fragile pages,” and then
imagining the painter and his muse’s “moments in the atelier
[...] bound to linen, then and later, time no friend to canvas
and paper.” The term “craquelure” refers to an
imperfection, a mark of wear on the painting, on the flesh, but
it lends a magnificence that can only exist after the ripening
touch of time. The cracked canvas is a singular wonder, and so
too is Loftus’s exquisitely frayed collection.
—BookLife
/ Publishers Weekly, 2023
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EDITOR'S
PICK — BookLife / Publishers Weekly
“Again and
again, he celebrates with quiet exactitude, the pleasure in a job
done right.”
This
third collection from Loftus (Fireflies)
finds the poet turning his considerable observational powers onto
the everyday, including a visit to an Asian market, a woman
reading at a truck stop, a dog gazing at the night sky, and a
trophy’s “golden boy / preening on a shelf.” An early
standout pays gently comic tribute to a pair of hands muddling
through a piano exercise, the rhythm and polish of the final
couplet more satisfying than the musical performance: “hand by
hand in double time, the right ahead, the left behind,” he
writes. The precision of that line exemplifies Loftus’s work.
Again and again, he celebrates, with quiet exactitude, the
pleasure in a job done right: backing up a trailer; jacking a car
up “just the way the Chilton says”; “or the boatwright /
scraping hulls, mixing varnish / to brush his world, / all alone
in his boneyard cold.”
Occasional inspired echoes
(his “See the swan unfurl herself” brings to mind Elizabeth
Bishop’s “a heron may undo his head”) will keep readers on
their toes, and some inspired play casts new light on the
familiar.
The dazzling “Fisher of Men” finds
fresh meaning in the phrase from Matthew 4:19, asking “After
all, what are we?” before contemplating our essence in short,
sculpted lines whose individual meanings coalesce into something
grander: “Salt, wet, / departure, return, / repeated show / of
quick, slow, / still, churning, /descending, ascent /”. The
idea, slippery yet powerful, surges on from there, though it’s
tempting to double back and revisit the earlier words with the
later ones in mind.
Loftus’s
work rewards but does not demand that kind of careful attention.
He’s adept at evocative yet concrete detail (the “Skoal cans,
and shorty Buds” of men out boating) and always imbues a
concluding line or couplet with memorable insight, a savvy double
meaning, or even a punchline. Autumn
offers
crisp, memorable verse, but also the opportunity to see what
Loftus sees.
These inspired poems celebrate precision
and seeing.
—BookLife / Publishers Weekly, 2021
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“Deeply
thoughtful and satisfyingly unpretentious poems.”
Loftus,
who previously wrote Dress
Whites (2018),
repeatedly marries the heady with the mundane in this sophomore
poetry collection.
There are a number of paradoxes
attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. Perhaps the
most famous involves the supposed impossibility of motion: To get
to any point, one must travel half of the way to it. To continue
one’s journey, one must then go half the remaining distance, or
one-quarter of the original trip. This pattern continues, but
because there’s no line so small that it can’t be bisected,
one will never reach one’s destination. Loftus’s poem “Zeno’s
Paradox” takes this arcane thought experiment and gives it
flesh and blood, reimagining it in terms of a man waiting for a
lover who will never arrive: “He waits. For her. To enter, shut
the door. /... / She’s still walking—to the broken steps, /
sagging porch and flapping door, / the table, couch, his brazen,
smelly hold— / as fast as he may summon her, / as slow as I
implore, / she will take forever.”
Thus does the
author recast the philosophical as the poignant, simultaneously
offering a new take on Zeno himself.
He does
something similar in “Camus sur le Pont,” whose title alludes
to the French novelist’s 1956 book-length reflection on
responsibility and abdication, The
Fall:
“A body strikes the water / so different after dark, / as if an
exit / were an entrance, / below, above, at once, / parting a
black mirror, / a looking glass of stars.” Camus’ book is
about a suicide on the Seine, but Loftus adroitly (and
devilishly) shifts readers’ focus away from the falling
woman to the water, which swallows the body impassively.
These
unexpected shifts in perspective are Loftus’s stock in trade,
and they infuse his deceptively straightforward poetry with depth
and texture.
Deeply
thoughtful and satisfyingly unpretentious poems.
—Kirkus
Reviews, 2020
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“A
compellingly emotional collection...Titles that launch his lines
of inquiry from the highest peaks.”
A
debut book of earthy, elegiac poetry.
In this work,
Loftus draws on imagery from the natural environment to paint a
picture of his speaker’s turbulent inner life and the calming
hum of his surroundings. In three parts, he presents scenes in
which the speaker faces not only nature, but history—be it his
own or humanity’s—in instances of daily life:
“At
the bookstore / in the discard bin / among the sonnets, / it
occurred to me: / I missed her.” Moments of vulnerability
punctuate the poems, whether it’s a feeling that catches the
speaker by surprise or when a sparrow tries relentlessly to
survive: “I heaped seeds around / her clutching feet. Absurdly,
/ you might think”; “her prescient eye still / turned toward
mine, / her silent mouth / singing to my bones.” However,
Loftus is doing something other than merely pointing out the
things that surround his speaker.
By
extracting the details that make up the big picture, the author
comments on the interconnectedness of social and natural life.
His poems evoke the greater romantic lyric, in which a landscape
becomes the mind and the poem, a psycho-geographical description.
Using maritime allusions, the author hints at the changing
symbolic function of water as it relates to aging: “the natural
wet / of water / it one day will press, / but glimmering wet, /
adolescent, / a thing that knows / no lover yet.” Although
poets have mined similar subject matter for centuries, Loftus
gives it a brief update, with original line breaks,
self-reflexive use of pronouns, and titles that launch his lines
of inquiry from the highest peaks: “Every word he rhymed
between / slippery purple carbon sheets / so not just he or I
would see / but all would know his splendor.” Ultimately, the
author offers readers a poetic climate that builds momentum until
it finally reaches the present and understanding.
A
compellingly emotional collection.
—Kirkus
Reviews, 2018
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RICHARD
GILMORE LOFTUS had a nomadic upbringing, spending time in the
Midwest, Greenwich Village, Dublin, and Majorca, in later years
finding his way to South Africa and Rwanda. He graduated from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison with degrees in English
literature and history. Loftus lives and writes in Michigan,
where he enjoys playing piano, walking with his dog, and building
wooden boats.
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Distributors include: Ingram, NASCORP,
Baker & Taylor
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rickloftus1@yahoo.com
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