Götterdämmerung

Götterdämmerung is Len Gasparini’s fifteenth book of poetry since the early 1970s. What distinguishes this collection from his earlier work is the long title poem: a tour de force that covers new ground in the genre of ecopoetics by launching an acerbic yet lyrical assault on the Anthropocene. Other poems explore such diverse themes as memory, art, and botany. Also included are three literary essays that evince the importance of language and imagination.

AUTHOR

Len Gasparini

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Len Gasparini is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, five short-story collections, including The Snows of Yesteryear (2011), The Undertaker’s Wife (,2007), and A Demon in My View (2003), which was translated into French as Nouvelle noirceur. He has also written two children’s books, a work of non-fiction, and a one-act play. In 1990, he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. In 2010, he won the NOW Open Poetry Stage event. Having lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Washington State, he now divides his time between Toronto and his hometown. Mirror Image, his latest collection, combines poetry and prose.

Reviews

Len Gasparini’s poems are sung with passion in a rich, original language. These poems are not pieced dryly together out of what Blake called a ‘mechanical talent’ for language, they arise unbidden and necessary.

– The Toronto Star

A reading of The Social Life of String will demonstrate what attending to life looks like as Gasparini turns the world into poetry.

Götterdämmerung joins a recent body of environmental poetry — see work by Juliana Spahr and Jorie Graham, among others — that recognizes the irremediably damaged state of our environment and eschews grand visions of an unblemished nature beyond civilization’s reach. It tests the powers of a nature poetry that has abandoned hope for ecological restoration. The poem’s kaleidoscopic structure reflects the disorder and disharmony it depicts. An Eliotic shoring of fragments against ruins — rather than any kind of wholesale renewal of the earth — seems all that is possible amid the destruction.