Get Light Years Selected Early Works 1969-1972 (A Dynamite Book) Composed By Merrill Gilfillan Issued As Version

cover pictures a satellite image of the eastern half of the United States, and the writing in this volume is just that ocularly raptorial.
The style holds up surprisingly well, considering the sheer tendency to attitudinize about what Gilfillan is looking at, whether it be a woman's "tits" or the dimples in her back, or "Spanishspeaking men unloading a small electric pump from a pickup truck".
Can that be accurate If so, the excess of it is trying to tell us something something about the speaker.
These poems are much more than the sum their most confident or cocksure moments, and the style is a fascinating distillation of a kind of Beat peripateticism, a pastoral O'Haraesque occasional poem, parody of James Wright "On weekends Irish boys used to swim the river and beat up Arabs for ambushing single Jews" and surrealism "Entered one ribbon of the town seen from a great distance you entered the other in the heat of the town.
Wicker gloom sat there like sex where we could see it, " The book selects from Gilfillan's small press things from Waldman and Fagin's Angel Hair, and others, He did another Selected inmore on that soon, . . The selection includes prosepoems and poetry from earlier books Truck Ten Cents Skyliner and : as well as previously unpublished work.
Merrill Gilfillan explores the essential content of

our cultures through a linguistic 'jumpcut' editing technique, He uses any and all the phenomena of human experience as information, and refuses to see any category of experience as inherently more significant than any other: sunset over the petrochemical plants of Elizabeth, N.
J. a string quartet Mexican table manners Nixon in Venezuela a toothache or gaspumps in the hills of Kentucky are all equally informative filmclips in his crosscultural collage.
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