The Bridge and the River by Timothy Carmody
"In the years I have worked with Timothy Carmody I have been frequently amazed and occasionally annoyed by his habitual production of really outstanding work. If The Bridge and the River sometimes betrays its influences—Charles Simic, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara—it must be conceded that the poet's choices are admirable, and the raw materials are always his own. These are early poems, and in them Mr. Carmody experiments with imagery, narrative, and voice, but his experiments are never simply academic, and the results are both sophisticated and affecting. Place matters. Memory persists. The pleasures of the world, slow and hard-won, are worth savoring. The same can be said of this collection."
—Gavin Craig, editor of Offbeat/1
From Detroit and Chicago to Harlem to Dublin, The Bridge and the River gives us a poetry as notable for its geographic exploration as its literary ambition. While Timothy Carmody's poems create new landscapes of the temporal, linguistic, and structural, it is, in the end, Carmody's empathy that makes his writing so powerful.
Poetry, 25 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.
Timothy Carmody was born in Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he studies Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
