The Calling

Bruce Bond’s meditative sequence of poetry entitled The Calling explores the act of naming as critical to survival—biologically, psychologically, and ethically—and yet no less an obstacle to attention, empathy, and the realization of a functional republic.What People Are SayingMidway through The Calling this appears: “I am learning to be two people, as voices are both voices /and the music in them.” There is no contemporary poet more aware of this fact as opportunity than Bruce Bond, whose music, whose severe and certain music, powerfully compels all the voices at his disposal throughout this book—all those journalists, children, and parents whose voicings became the poet’s. The politics of this book is an esthetic as glorious as the politics of the era in which it arises is debased: “I was looking back from a time / where I too would be speechless. / The earth green. No. Greener.” The Calling succeeds in making beauty where there had been pain, which is the great gift of poetry. —Bin RamkeBruce Bond’s remarkable book-length sequence manages to be many things at once—a searing indictment of the Trump imperium, a bittersweet elegy for the author’s father, a tractate, a lamentation, a prayer. It is a vexed book for our vexing times. The collection’s stance—in the tradition of contemporary masters such as Milosz and Geoffrey Hill—is an admixture of sorrow, rage, and wonder. This is a book of hard-won consolation, a talisman against our bewilderment. —David WojahnAbout the AuthorBruce Bond is the author of twenty-five books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas. 3