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  • The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford by Frank Stanford book cover
  • The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford by Frank Stanford book cover
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The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford

by Frank Stanford

Selected poems spanning a brief, concentrated career

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Selected poems spanning a brief, concentrated career

Gathering work from Frank Stanford’s nine published volumes alongside six previously unpublished poems, this collection traces a change in the concerns described across his poetry. The earlier poems build a mythic world that holds childhood and resists time’s passage; later work confronts death more directly. That shift gives the selection a clear through-line, while its range of poems offers a view of the development of Stanford’s subjects between his first book in 1972 and his death in 1978.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in American poetry from the 1970s.
  • Those seeking a selected collection that includes both published and previously unpublished poems.
  • Readers interested in poetry engaging with childhood, myth, time, and death.

Themes

Childhood and mythTime and mutabilityDeathPoetic development

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, "Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five."

The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.

Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.

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