David St. John
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David St. John
The publication of Study for the World’s Body: New & Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1994, reinforced David St. John’s reputation as a poet of wild imagination and formidable accomplishment. Now, with the arrival of The Red Leaves of Night, St. John further demonstrates his extraordinary gifts as a poet of true vision and virtuosity in this seamless meditation on the ecstatic anguish of possession and loss.
Possession and loss, rapture and despair: David St. John’s narrator remains unflinchingly aware that the trajectory between these two states is brief. Like a modern Dante’s Virgil, he guides us through a mosaic of experiences, each more intense and illuminating than the one before. Once our journey commences, its central purpose soon becomes clear: to limn the vast architecture of erotic desire and communion.
Indeed, it is on the sexual landscape that St. John’s most wrenching and primordial dramas are enacted. Sexual communion—with its potential for the dissolution of all spiritual and physical boundaries between two formerly separate…
Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems
David St. John
Study for the World’s Body showcases the work of one of America’s most celebrated and groundbreaking poets. In this remarkable and powerful new collection, he has selected the most evocative and well-loved poems from his earlier books and combined them with dazzling new ones. In 1976, St. John made his poetic debut with the publication of Hush, a book that immediately established him as a writer of astonishing power and vision, and revealed the theme that has proven central to his writing throughout his career: desire. In Hush and the three collections that follow it, desire plays out its drama on the body. St. John explores both its physical, erotic manifestations and its spiritual ones with intellectual rigor and an emotional engagement that vibrates with intensity.
In his latest poems, St. John has turned his attention more acutely to the moral dimension of desire, writing about the spiritual hardships of the mature soul—sin and alienation, and our true and sometimes thwarted hunger for genuine spiritual communion. These newer poems possess a dark, exciting quality…
