Odd Bloom Seen from Space
by Timothy Daniel Welch
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Pub Date Apr 15 2017 | Archive Date Apr 15 2017
University of Iowa Press | Iowa Poetry Prize
Description
But it’s in the act of discovery, through the hero’s immediate ancestry that Welch’s debut collection confronts big questions about family, music, art, and memory. Like a contemporary Diogenes who pursues meaning one small gesture at a time, Welch comes to learn truth is a “brutal commerce,” beauty is “white legs / upon which she shed her childhood,” time is “Michael Jackson / hooting in the trees,” and “Love is gradual, a bottle / by sips, a bottle / poured onto the floor.” There is wisdom to be gained from these inventive pursuits, but in the end it’s not what is said, but how it’s said with terse rhetoric, deep imagery, and surprising humor that makes Odd Bloom Seen from Space such a gorgeous, original, and baffling collection.
Advance Praise
“In these poems, Welch is an attentive watcher who has ‘lived most of my life alone.’ From the little distance he cultivates, he manages a detailed view of the big picture. He is sometimes at the seashore, where he can observe children at play, seals ‘lifting their backs / upon the water,’ and wonders, ‘is there a story to each wave that crosses the sea?’ He looks to the distant shores of Greece, both for its timeless myths that are the roots of Western thought, and perhaps for more personal connections. This is classical poetry set in our time, with room for ‘Owls and their Michael Jackson / hooting in the trees’ and ‘reading Anna Karenina / on a Kindle.’ The ‘odd bloom’ of the title is an astronaut’s vision of the towers collapsing on 9/11, though Welch sees it ‘peripherally, which is what this is, some side-line / reflection’; history seems to happen to other people, in other places, affording Welch his detached viewpoint from which a kind of unbiased truth might be reported. Finally, for all its subtle sarcasms, this is a deeply earnest book, one sensitive soul’s reckoning with a troubled age.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“In language gemlike, shining, Timothy Daniel Welch invokes the labors of Hercules, an odd bloom seen from space, a mother’s death, fishing, snow, and an ode to a nose, to embrace the vagaries of memory and the mysteries of time and the universe, in poems that continually seduce and surprise. ‘Imagine a book of poems catching fire in the afternoon,’ and you will know this book of marvels, this marvel of a book.”—Ronald Wallace, author, For Dear Life
“In rich and heartbreaking lines, Welch gives meaning to our designs—cubist, elliptical, often erotic. ‘There’s beauty in wanting more / time to be young, to sing and seize it in a photograph or / music video before it goes from us.’”—Sandra Alcosser, author, Except by Nature
“Like the grand subject of Timothy Daniel Welch’s poem ‘Nose of Least Comparison,’ Welch’s debut book is wonderfully distinct, handsomely made, and exhibits those historical pressures and markers that make for a very particular and brilliant consciousness. The reader of Odd Bloom Seen from Space is in for surprise after surprise. Not once could I figure where Welch was taking me at the start of a poem, and the pleasure of this poet’s sure-handed, illuminating guidance is immense. This is a book that earns such trust and affection, for its intellectual honesty, format expertise, capacious heart, and occasionally roguish wit. Truly, I can’t say enough good things about it. It’s one of the best debut books I’ve read in many years.”—Erin Belieu, Florida State University
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781609385040 |
| PRICE | $21.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 92 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Matt S, Book Trade Professional
Holy shit. This collection had so many things I usually hate in poetry from incessant name dropping of Greeks and Great Poets (tm) to 9/11 references, but the writing is so damn good.
These poems are firmly rooted in time and so lovingly biographical, but there's also such great variety to them. The writing is at times frantic and masculine and strange" a little 7os Philip Levine-ish. And in the next breath it's this delicate and deliberate and vulnerable story. Mostly what it is idiosyncratic, weird in this very human way.
I don't know, man. This review is trash because I can't really even pin down what it is I love about this collection of poetry so much. I requested it because the description called it nostalgic and that's definitely my wheelhouse, but the rest of the book description up there doesn't do it much justice. It tries to intellectualize this little ball of nerves of a book. I didn't take away any big life lessons or feel like I was reading about a modern Diogenes. I kept reading because people don't usually leave their guts all over the page like this.
Joseph S, Reviewer
If we aren't victims of our kind hearts then
our stupid lives are sad
Odd Bloom Seen from Space by Timothy Daniel Welch is the Iowa Poetry Prize winner for 2016. Welch's poetry may be found in journals such as Rattle, Arts & Letters, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review Online, and elsewhere. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
An odd bloom was the description used by Frank Culbertson to describe the debris cloud he saw when looking down on Manhatten from the International Space Station on 9/11/2001. The title poem is tucked away in the middle of the collection and the poet reflects on the "odd blooms" in his own life. The collection takes an autobiographical tone and the reader can see the "odd blooms" throughout the poet's life. These odd blooms are moments captured when something remarkable happens that one is not sure how to process without more information or time or just some little bit of information or experience that sticks with one for a lifetime. One odd bloom could have been Bolero. The poet titles the second section, and a poem, after the movie or at least what that movie meant to him as he remembers his illicit viewing of the movie and its influence later in life.
The poet looks back at life and the people in it from memories of an old girlfriend who worked at a 1950s themed diner to an eccentric friend named Frank. There is a merging of old Greek gods and the Christian one mingling is well seen in "To Laura -- A Virgin Unwed." The poet also dates himself in his work with not only Bolero but Michael Jackson's Thriller. "Owls," a more disturbing piece, makes the connection with the past and current:
Owls and their Michael Jackson
hooting in the trees, eyes
snow-burned with light, predators of the very
small, and fluttering like
Michael Jackson in his castle for children—
Welsh captures a nostalgic feeling for the past and things in the past that changed him or managed to stick with him through life -- Family, friends, events, tradition, and even pop culture. In a longer poem "Working for My Father" ties the ancient, the near past, family, and what we see together nearly perfectly. A well-done work deserving of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
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