Ziggurat
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Acknowledgments
One
Going to Zero
Warhol / Madison Ave. / 9-11
World Trade Center / Mail Runner / ’71
Warhol / Blue Jackie
World Trade Center / Mail Runner / ’73
Warhol / Electric Chair / ’63
World Trade Center / Black Holes / ’74
Warhol / Race Riot / ’63
Elevator, Midtown, ’74
Two
A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy
Three
Three Decades
Reading Dickinson / Summer ’68
Grant’s Tomb
Self-Portrait with Bird
The Alley
Early Spring
Blue Room
9 /11, Emily Dickinson
Sarajevo
Notes
"Dark as Balakian’s poems sometimes are, Ziggurat shines with brilliant insight, courage, and exceptional artistry. This is an important, rewarding book."
“Balakian’s poems create a world sustained by the power of associations, in which borders get thinned out and lives that seem unconnected flow on each other. Even as he focuses on his relationship with the world, he avoids indulging in monolog, instead using reportorial diction to sketch flashes of scenes that seem as if they are taken by cameras with cracked lenses. VERDICT Aesthetically rich and engaging; recommended for all serious poetry readers."
“With characteristic originality, Balakian finds his echoing motif in the construction of the first great skyscraper, the Ziggurat at Ur, and this gives his epic poem, ‘A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,’ a historical depth I have found nowhere else in American poetry in recent years. What Balakian has achieved here is a brilliant assimilation of the historical, philosophical, political, and psychological.”
“Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves it into an exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until it feels like it’s breaking into something new. This is how idioms change, advance. Balakian renders scenes and at the same time enacts the sensibility being breached and affected—9/11 is just shorthand for our new magnitudes of violence and dissociation. The frames of contemporary life, and our recent history, fit together because they have been brought to account in the self of the poet. The work aims to reveal the human capacity to integrate and, after hard passage, transcend.”
"This is very urban poetry, written in free verse but with an unbreakable sentence rhythm. . . . Though Balakian’s poems are quickly comprehensible, there is a deeper meaning which appears when we realize that they are about law disappearing, to be replaced by Chaos."
"Whether as a poet, historian, or memoirist, Balakian has consistently cast himself as the modern observer, the consummate ’witness,’ a New Jersey native of Armenian descent, straddling the line between cultures and ages, translating that experience into words. Ziggurat redefines that act of bearing witness as an act of retrospection in its deepest sense, a looking back that is as much about the experience of fractured consciousness as it is about what it observes."—Harvard Review
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