Restless Astronomy
Restless Astronomy Media Kit
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Michael Gilmore is astonishingly good at pulling us into the center of what it means to ache with the power and vulnerability of art and love. He can capture the delicacy of lace caught in a button and equally eviscerate a pompous radio personality with Freudian puns of fish and cigars. Visual and visceral, Restless Astronomy slices into the madness coiled within the simultaneously bloated and anorexic American monster. Gilmore’s x-ray insight into our historical blindness is at once bracing and heartbreaking. Poets call us to action that both acknowledges and refutes the power of one ego to determine the destiny of others. Yet, we must also act to face our common humanities. Gilmore trusts that the center will hold in the centrifuge of the human soul.
Michael Gilmore was born on Port Royal Island, South Carolina in 1952. In elementary school he performed plays he wrote for the entertainment of classmates. He started writing poetry in junior high school. In high school he discovered Thoreau, Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Pound and Eliot, and the High Modernists. He also discovered Mayakovsky and Pasternak, both of whom he read under klieg lights at the dry docks of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyards in Virginia. Just out of high school he was drafted two weeks before Nixon ended the practice. After two years in the army, he married and attended the University of Texas at Austin. Neither worked out. He knocked around the Austin economy as a tobacconist, a legal clerk, house demolitionist, and rare book cataloger. He co-founded Aileron, a literary journal with Ed Buffaloe and Jim Harris. During the Aileron years, he had two daughters with an acupuncturist from California. But the web that has no weaver unwound. In 1989, he married the linguistic anthropologist, Catherine Farris, and moved to the Republic of China. After China, they lived in New York City and had a daughter in Iowa. After spending another year in the ROC, they returned to Austin, where they have lived since 1999.
Praise for Restless Astronomy
“This stunning collection of poetry is distilled from a lifetime of experience, heightened reflection, living abroad, wide reading and travel, and decades dedicated to the craft of poetry. Philosophical absent the tedium of esoteric argument, these stunning poems sparkle with vivid imagery, revealing a world where leaves are “butterflies impaled on jutting twigs” and water falls “like miniature hooves;” where youth “pivots upon its destiny” and fog is “…huddling on the lawn.” Gilmore’s allusions are as multifarious as the musings of his interesting mind, from The Valkyries and Madame Pissarro to Darwin, Stalin and Pound. His diction is artfully direct and musical, belying the profundity of his thought and observation. Each page of this daring collection of poems smolders before our eyes, lucent with love and erudition.” -Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate
“Characterized by unexpected imagery and sly, often sidelong, eroticism, Restless Astronomy charts a poet’s trajectory across the mental, emotional, and physical spheres of his life. These poems rise from the page with confidence, grace, and strange beauty- moving out of the realm of the personal to that of wider experience.” -Robert Stikmanz, author of The Hidden Lands of Nod series, for Midwest Book Review
“Restless Astronomy is a mix of dark and light, joy and sadness, and humor and melancholy. If one poem seems too dark, the next one will probably be much lighter. It is an interesting mix and a very enjoyable one. At times it is a bit pretentious, but that passes quickly. It is a fun, quirky mix of poems.” -Breeni Books
“Gilmore is no amateur poet. Indeed, some of these poems are among the best being published in the U.S. today…Gilmore’s talent is as good as it gets when it comes to poetry. If you pick up this book, you will definitely want to read it out loud. Gilmore works language masterfully, and the sounds are simply stunning. Overall, this is a very strong pick in the poetry genre.” -Armchair Interviews
“Mr. Gilmore writes entirely in free verse, and isn’t limited by strictures of grammar or punctuation. Ranging from Modern to Post Modern, the poems explore a broad range of topics, usually coming back to individual experience. In some cases, poems that start in the third person, confess to first person by the final stanza. The poems tend to be an open-work of sketched images, vivid, with space between for the evoked ideas to meld and meet. Mr. Gilmore doesn’t tell you how to feel, but sets a scene and steps away, letting readers fill in the space from their own experiences.” -TCM Reviews
“It is a poetic voice both delicate and carnal, surreal and quotidian, and not infrequently all of these things at once. In these poems we encounter again and again . . . [m]oments of startling clarity.” -from the Foreword by Linda Leavell, author of Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color
“Gilmore’s well-wrought verses oscillate between extreme erudition and boundless hilarity. I envy readers discovering Michael Gilmore for the first time.” -Mark Smith, former Austin Book Award Winner and author of Riddle
“Frankly, I was almost rendered speechless by these poems by my old friend. Every word is a revelation for me, familiar and new both-at-once.” -Ed Buffaloe, One-time editor of Aileron Magazine
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Purchase Information
Book Sellers and Libraries: Please contact your favorite wholesaler, or buy directly from:
Other Buyers: E-mail neil@daltonpublishing.com
