Night of a Thousand Blossoms
Frank Gaspar
One of 12 books honored as the "Best Poetry of 2004" by Library Journal
In his fourth collection, Gaspar's unique narrative idiom—lush, songful, insistent—firmly establishes him as a distinct, important voice. In these poems, the poet restlessly inhabits the night, finding it terrifying and beautiful, searching for meaning in the yard, the neighborhood, the heavens, and every wise book he owns. These urban pastoral meditations employ ritual and repetition to create a kind of mantra, seeking surrender to that state of meditation leading to enlightenment—yet arguing with the idea of surrendering any attachments at all to this world we’ve been given to learn and love: a city garden cohabited by ancient Romans and tattooed kids, automobiles and hollyhock, marauding cats and the Buddha. "I should be satisfied with the household gods," he mourns, but is satisfied with nothing, determined to fit the whole world into his poems lest the one essential thing slip by.
"Gaspar's poems look dense upon the page—and float like a thousand blossoms in the wind."
—Library Journal
"Gaspar's long, prose-like lines—like translations from dreams—surround the reader with their capaciousness and flowing diction."
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[Frank Gaspar] is one of the best poets writing today."
—The Bloomsbury Review
"...one is carried upward by the cool, ineffable beauty [Gaspar's poems] exude."
—Library Journal
"Gaspar is a genuine talent, a true poet, a real seeker. Trust him; his poems will take you on profound journeys."
—Booklist
"Frank Gaspar’s poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing. In them he is speaking to the reader—but also to himself, or perhaps to some hazy divinity, or to the blue sky. I felt in his voice no attempt to persuade me of anything. I felt only the abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about.”
—Mary Oliver
"No one in America writes as Frank Gaspar does. His poetic voice is distinctive. His poems mutter and fuss in the tone of the sage awake and singing through the night to worry, as we do, the state of the soul in contemporary life. Father, lover, scholar, friend, and poet, he speaks for us as no one else can. And I for one am grateful for this fabulous book."
—Hilda Raz
“Any book that begins with a poem titled ‘I Go Out for a Smoke and Become Mistaken for the Archangel’ and ends on the sentence ‘And so I kicked and kicked’ is bound to contain grand evolutions, and Gaspar delivers. The path he so often weaves—from questions, through catalog of pathetic fallacies, to abstracted answers—can be a stunning rhetorical tapestry….Gorgeous.”
—Provincetown Arts
about the author
Frank X. Gaspar is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Holyoke, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, and A Field Guide to the Heavens (winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry), and a novel, Leaving Pico, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the California Book Award for First Fiction. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 1996 and 2000, among others. His many honors and awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Edgar Stanley Award and a Readers' Choice Award (both from Prairie Schooner). Born in Provincetown, MA, he now lives in southern California.
Author photo by David A. Lipton
