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You
Never Know
Reviews
BookSense.com Daily Pick
UK Guardian Highlight of the Year (Chosen by Glen Baxter)
Paul Auster:
“Is there another American poet who could make us stop and wonder why woodpeckers don’t get headaches? Could anyone else do a better job of evoking the small, tactile pleasures of sweeping up dust with a cornstraw broom? The Ron Padgett of yore is still with us—as charming, unpretentious, and surprising as ever—but there is a new Ron Padgett in this book as well: a poet of heart-breaking tenderness and ever deepening wisdom. In You Never Know, he has become a chronicler of mortality, an elegist of worlds that vanish before our eyes.”
Glen Baxter, UK Guardian:
“You Never Know would be my contender for Book of the Year . . . Here we see the poet at the height of his extraordinary powers, sparkling with wit and erudition.”
BookSense.com:
“Ron Padgett’s latest book is a delight for the lazy sensualist who wants a decent book lying around the house to provide wonderful moments of insight, joy, and reflection at any time of day or night.”
Colorado Springs Independent:
“You Never Know brings Padgett’s vision into brilliantly sharp focus as he opens the gates to the carnival of his mind.”
Minneapolis City Pages:
“For those who believe that hugeness and mystery can reside in the small and fleeting, a single poem from Padgett’s latest collection, You Never Know, might feel like a feast. . . . it’s astonishing how often Padgett makes so little resonate so much.”
Detroit Metro Times:
“Is there a more insane and sublime poet writing in America today? Padgett touches that place where infinite longing meets the modest pleasures of life, in the most lyrical ways imaginable. He’s the feeling modernist of our time.”
Midwest Book Review:
“The poetry of Ron Padgett is hallmarked with a very special wit and an artfully conversational American approach. You Never Know offers a complete spectrum of his style, which has a penchant for surprise and discovery, all in service to acknowledging the simple magic of everyday life.”
World Literature Today:
“There’s a disarmingly relaxed and unpretentious quality to the poems in You Never Know, in which small gestures and seemingly insignificant details persuade and delight in the best poems by discovering unexpected humor or profundity.”
Publishers Weekly:
“Coming through with clarity and charm in his seventh full collection, Padgett is the undisputed Zen master of the chicane, maintaining a perfectly readable and casual tone while turning meanings on a dime, or several dimes, on his way to a reliably radiant and melancholy conclusion . . . this is Padgett’s most moving book to date.”
Robert Creeley:
“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder. You never know what he’ll think of next!”
John Ashbery:
“These ‘late’ poems of Ron Padgett have the clearness, the small sadness, and the big space of Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the many French writers he has translated into English. They are like a glass of transparent Vittel water held against the sky of Paris. ‘I am forty-nine years old and surrounded by death. Does writing help? Probably not,’ he writes in a poem about a friend who has since died. But Ron’s writing helps us. Enormously.”
Alice Notley:
“A Padgett classic. He has, with obvious premeditation and pleasure, employed his most characteristic ‘tricks’ to produce a deep, funny book. The poet makes superlative use of the directive writing consciousness—often automatic pilot—to tap the unconscious for memory, vision, emotion, and the unexpected and indefinable. The poems speak backwards and forwards in time, to self, to family and friends, to poetic technique, to the birds caged in the chest. It is so lovely.”
James Tate:
“Ron Padgett’s poems sing with absolutely true pitch. And they are human friendly. Their search for truths, both small and large, can be cause for laughter, or at least a thoughtful sigh. You Never Know is a delightful antidote to anything pretentious. These poems are agile and lucid and glad to be alive. It’s a pleasure to recommend them.”
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